A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Today in reading slashdot, I followed the link to an article on solar trees. I got to thinking after reading this quote:

“The solar cells on the tree were able to store enough electricity in spite of receiving no direct solar light for days at a time because of the clouds. They showed that solar trees really are a practical form of street lighting,” Christina Werner from Cultural Project Management (Kulturelles Projektmanagement, Vienna) told RenewableEnergyAccess.com.

that it would a great idea if cities in the United States followed up on this method of lighting the streets. The solar trees at least from this picture are graceful and actually more pleasing to look at then the usual light posts. In the long run it could reduce the cost of having the night streets lit for safety. Electricity costs a lot. It uses fuel that is rapidly getting difficult to find and it seems to me that while most of Europe and Asia are looking for alternative energy sources, we’re lagging behind. It seems that we often spend more time trying to be minimally more efficient using the same technology rather than lifting our heads and thinking outside the box.

Besides, I like the idea of solar trees — though I have to admit that my first thought was not quite a match for the actual structure shown. Guess I read too much science fiction.

There’s just something about that space between Christmas and the New Year. There’s all the anticipation of Christmas; of family arriving, joy, laughter, and the sharing of stories. Then Christmas is over and loved ones return to their lives. The wrapping paper is recycled, the dishes done, the leftovers packed away, the last story told, and the hugs and tears of a parting for another year. And yet another celebration is looming — New Years Eve and the start of a new year full of possibilities.

New Years has always been special to me. It’s a time to look over the past year and say goodbye to the mistakes, polish the successes, and decide what to focus on in the coming year. Not so much making resolutions to NOT do something but deciding what I will do during the coming year. Make a list, check it twice, and hope that the energy and positive feelings of this holiday season will be the catalyst for the positive achievement of some of the goals on my list.

Some of my hopeful goals

Learn to knit two socks at the same time with circular needles;
Finish at least 4 of my UFOs (UnFinished Objects);
Write up the directions for the shrug and sweater I’ve been working on;
Post at least 4 times a week in this blog;
Finish my 3 hanging short stories and send them out;
Finish the novel Paul and I are working on together (it’s been half done for over a two years);
Read at least one (adult) non-fiction book every two months;
Remember to be grateful for every day;
Strive to get more food out of our garden than the critters get from our garden

Small steps, small goals — hopefully next year at this time I can say I did all this, though I think the hardest one is going to be the “Remember to be grateful for every day”. What about you?

[Note: When I was looking around I found Amazon had Music for Motivation (cover art used for this post). There’s also several other albums of music for various activities: thinking, learning, de-stressing, and relaxing among others.]

An article on slashdot.org the other day got me thinking about the past. This particular article concerns the SkySails company’s plans to retrofit a ship owned by partner company Beluga with a kite. Well, not just any old kite, but a 320m² sail-like kite connected to a 15 meter tall mast on the bow. With the kite flying about 300 meters in the air, the company figures that under favorable conditions, fuel costs could be reduced by about 20% ($1600/day is what’s quoted in the article). The company also claims that later versions of the kite (basically bigger models) will save even more (perhaps as high as 50%). So basically what we have here is a return to the days of sailing. Sure the technology’s been updated, and the application is somewhat different, but all in all, the idea is to take what nature gives for free and make use of it.

Sail power was eliminated back in the day when steam/diesel/gasoline/whatever power became cheap. If it takes a couple of dozen people to work the sails, but only a half-dozen to run the engines, and oil is dirt cheap to boot, it makes good economic sense to ditch the sails and just power your way through the waves. But now fuel costs are rising and computers can control things faster and more easily than people. Now, suddenly, the free power of the wind makes economic sense again.

This then reminded me of the German company Cargolifter (original company currently in bankruptcy, new version just starting to get off the ground but hampered by that old bankruptcy snafu). Basically they want to build a dirigible capable of carrying 160 tons of cargo. Filled with helium, this massive airship would float over rivers, mountains, and what have you and be able to deliver large and combersome deliveries to precisely where they are needed. Hydrogen would be even better, but the tragedy of the Hindenburg won’t die in people’s minds, even though we now know it wasn’t the hydrogen that was the problem. Moving at a speed of about 50 miles/hour, they wouldn’t be fast, but it could still cross the U.S. from coast to coast in about three days. And since trains run at roughly the same speed (slower inside of cities), they show great potential. The problem is that everyone “knows” that dirigibles are dangerous, and expensive, and just plain won’t work. That tends to make funding them difficult and, since they are expensive, cash flow issues tend to lead to bankruptcy for anyone trying to bring them back (see the first sentence in this paragraph). I think one of the most dangerous things to true progress in this world is all the facts that are “known”, but are not actually true.

While reading up on both these concepts, the thing that struck me most about the objections were things like: What if the wind isn’t blowing? Everyone is quick to jump up and list reasons why things won’t work, but most of them are specific objections for specific circumstances. The answer to that particular questions is: You use the engines. Are there problems with these technologies? Sure. But what happens when your car breaks down? What happens if you run out of gas? These are problems we face every day, but somehow we’ve learned to deal with them. New technologies will also have problems and we’ll just learn to deal with them too.

Perhaps the past still has something to offer the future, provided we’re willing to stop looking down our noses at it and accept the possibilities.

Here it is the day of Christmas Eve. My son arrived yesterday and today I baked an apple pie and bread rolls. The pie is traditional for our family. It’s a cross between a Butterscotch Apple Pie and a French Apple Pie only with pecans and crasins. The bread rolls are from a Fanny Farmer cookbook and are great. With luck they’ll last until tomorrow but there so good out of the oven — hot with butter — that’s it’s going to be a near thing.

The tree is up and decorated with the old star ornament that seems to always want to lean one way of the other but never sit up straight. I collect Santa ornaments and so the tree is decorated with Santa Clauses of various kinds . We also collect bears, including bear ornaments, so there’s lots of bears on our tree as well. Mostly the ornaments are those Paul and I pick up as we see something that has meaning for us but they tend to be sort of a mix of country-ish ornaments, Santas, and bears (with the occasional tiger for Paul).

My son often doesn’t make it for the holidays since he works a lot of part-time jobs and a missed day is a day of pay missed so having him here for Christmas is a real treat. I hope that everyone has a very happy holiday season filled with love, laughter, and joy. Party wisely and if travel take care. Best wishes to all. To keep track of Santa’s trip check out NORAD.

Every now and then I think about what I would do IF I ruled the world. Today, I was thinking about voting reform for the US.

1. Get rid of the electoral college. It was a great idea in the beginning because travel was difficult and communications weren’t as swift. But in today’s world of instant communication, where the votes are tallied and counted within hours of the closing of the poles there’s no need to have it — it’s another way that the will of the people can be changed by a group that really, in many states, isn’t even obligated to vote inline with the popular vote for that state. So, get rid of it. The vote is the vote and that’s that.
2. Add two new categories to every slate of candidates. First, “None of the Above”. If “None of the Above” wins the office then none of the candidates who are running are allowed to run again for that office for at least 2 years. The office needs a new slate and another election. So, it costs a bit more to run a second election but finally the people might actually get a slate where they are not voting for the lesser of two evils but actually voting for someone. Second, “Don’t care”. This isn’t the same as “None of the Above” because it’s similar to leaving the ballot blank. What it provides is a measure of voter apathy. If “Don’t Care” wins, well, it’s an indication that this is a bad group running for office particularly if “None of the Above” comes in second.
3. Count votes with the “Australian Run-Off System”. This method has a lot of different names but that’s the one I’m familiar with. Basically, voters rank the candidates as first choice, second choice, and so forth. You don’t have to rank them all you could just have a first choice pick. However, if the first choice doesn’t win by a specified margin then the candidate with the lowest number of votes is thrown out and the votes are recalculated so that all the ballots that had the disqualified person in 1st place, now have their 2nd place person become their 1st place person, and all the ballots are counted again. You can read here for a more detailed explanation as it’s used in the Hugo voting. This would allow 3rd party candidates to actually have a shot at winning. Right now 3rd party candidates really don’t have a chance as so many voters are trying to make sure that the greater evil doesn’t win and don’t want to split votes to get who they want because they have to make sure the evil one doesn’t win. With this system, if your first candidate is eliminated, you get to automatically try again with your second place candidate and your vote isn’t “wasted” by voting for someone that “can’t win”.
4. Get rid of the proprietary and secret electronic voting machines. If we’re going to use electronic machines, then they should be open source. All the code should be available for anyone to inspect, and the certified code that is going to be used should be check-summed so that the polling places can verify that the certified code is, in fact, what’s being used. Furthermore, the raw vote counts should be made immediately available after the vote for review. Lastly, every voting machine should print out a record which is reviewed by the voter and then placed in a hopper for recounting purposes. A certain percentage of voting districts should be randomly selected and have recounts performed and compared to the electronic totals. Elections results in America should be the property of the American people and therefore be as open and transparent as it is possible to be.

That’s it for now. I really think that some of these should be instituted as a way to make sure the actual will of the people prevails, rather than the whole thing being to see that the lesser of several evils doesn’t win. I probably still won’t like the outcome but at least I’ll feel that every candidate had a fair shot at the office they wanted.

For a long time now, my husband and I have joked about the chaotic nature of the non-traffic jam. You know the ones where you crawl along on the interstate or highway for mile after mile and then, at last, get to the head of the jam and there’s nothing there.  So you just sail on at the posted speed wondering what just happened. We’ve said it’s chaos in action or a curious statistical anomaly.

Well, now mathematicians have solved the problem from this article:

Mathematicians from the University of Exeter have solved the mystery of traffic jams by developing a model to show how major delays occur on our roads, with no apparent cause. Many traffic jams leave drivers baffled as they finally reach the end of a tail-back to find no visible cause for their delay.

It seems Paul and I weren’t that far off. The mathematicians developed a model that shows that when one event happens — say a truck unexpectedly changing lanes — the cars nearest slow down, the cars behind slow down even more, and this begins a backward wave that slows all traffic, causing the jam that can stretch for miles but having no apparent cause when any car reaches the beginning of the slow down.

Granted we don’t have mathematical degrees but since I’ve independently come up with this explanation for the phenomena — I’m really glad to hear that they’ve come up with a model for this behavior. I always find it interesting that seemingly random and unexplainable behavior has not only an explanation, but a equation or group of equations that can cause the same behavior in controlled conditions. This is the first step in understanding and hopefully coming up with ideas for handling this phenomena.

Of course, we’ve learned to handle the slow downs and increased time on the road by listening to books on tape. It’s the best way to travel in a car. It keeps the mind occupied, gives us a chance to read a book we might otherwise not get to, and you can turn it off and talk about the section you just heard or discuss a tangential topic the book raised. So far we’ve listened to The Life of Pi and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (read by the author). It’s made the hours on the road (each trip was 8 hours one way) much more enjoyable as quality together time.

Two years ago, I got a link to video of a house in the mid-west that had synchronized Christmas light to a Trans Siberian Orchastra Christmas song (here’s a link to a this year version). I just loved it. It was amazing how the lights and music worked together. Last year the same person did another incredible job. I’ve of course lost those links and can’t remember the name of the person who did the lights. Tonight finishing up some last minute shopping (I lost my darning needle — actually, I’ll find them now that I’ve bought a replacement set of needles (you’d think with 6 darning needle sets I’d be able to find one but ….)). Anyway, on the drive home I got to thinking that no one had sent me a link to a synchronized Christmas light show — were they so common no one bothered anymore? Once I got home I googled and then searched again on YouTube. My criteria was simple Christmas light for 2007 and the music also had to be a Christmas song (there were a few outstanding videos but it wasn’t Christmas music. I really liked the one I’ve embedded here because I love the song.

Christmas Lights 2007 Carol Bells

Go to YouTube and put “Christmas Lights 2007” in the search field without the quotes and make sure you have a cup of hot coffee/tea/chocolate and sit back and enjoy. These people are dedicated, talented, and extremely patient to get the lights, channels and synchronization all to work together. These unsung hero deserve to be seen.

Not for good of course, just for the year. The last couple of weeks of the year are always something of a dead time here in U.S. government-land. In fact, so many people are out on vacation that the government actually mandates a freeze on all activity related to production servers. We do important work (weather forecasting related) and what we do helps save lives all over the world. So the last thing we want is for someone to make a change to a server that causes production to fail when the three people who know how the system works are on vacation and scattered across the continent.

It’s a good policy, one a heartily agree with. We have another one about not making changes on Friday’s for the same reason, although since there are 52 of them in a year, that policy tends to get waved a lot, which leads to disasters, which reminds us why we have the policy in the first place.

Now, the freeze doesn’t officially affect me. My group runs one system that is classified as a “Prototype, Experimental, Proof of Concept System”. You can’t get much more weaselly than that, and it pretty much frees us of the burden of the freeze. And yet our “experimental system” feeds data to a dozen other organizations that use it for their own critically important systems. And they scream like banshees when our system goes down. So, even though we’re still classed as development, we’re treated as production and the freeze “effectively” applies to us. We have a second system which we’re in the middle of porting everything over to, but we’re at a standstill at the moment pending governmental decisions. Did I mention they’re all on vacation? So we’re waiting until next year for continue on that front.

So, what does this mean? It means I have lots of time to respond to e-mail and write extra blog entries instead of doing the work I’m being paid for. And every day that takes us closer to Christmas reduces the number of people in the building, and therefore the few remaining bits of work that are left to me. My one shining ray of light is that one of our redundant servers just had its file system corrupted. Yes, that’s the good news. Because that means I’m going to be busy for at least a day rebuilding the file system, reloading the applications, and reinitializing the accounts. The bad news is that I need to have the system security people scan it before it can be put back on line. Oh, did I mention … they’re all on vacation.