A Curious Statistical Anomaly

This time of month things get a bit crazy as we struggle to get all the zines ready to go live on January 1st. (You’ll see the list of our ezines on the left of this blog.)

I’ve just about finished getting everyone’s reviews, essays, and interviews in the system and proofed.  Now I get to work on my stuff — reviews, interviews, and editorial comments.  But it looks we’ll make it in time.  I even got the interview answers back from one of the authors for Gumshoe Review.  I’m excited about that — I haven’t looked at them yet but I got them and that’s exciting.

I’m also working on some other projects, so time is tight.  Did you know that when you work for other people you work (usually) a forty hour week sometimes fifty but when you work for yourself you tend to work every day of the week and a lot more hours than for an employer.  I think I must be a horrible boss for myself — I make me work really, really hard.  The upside though is I get to work at home (next to the coffee pot).

Love Actually is directed by Richard Curtis and stars, among others, Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, and Alan Rickman. That’s a pretty heavy duty cast so you’d expect some outstanding performances. Luckily it doesn’t disappoint. It’s not just one love story, it several–at least eight. It’s also a comedy and a Christmas movie. With all that going for it, I couldn’t resist.

This is one of those movies that grows on you the more you watch it. It begins and ends in an airport — so there’s a sense of completion, even though not all the smaller stories within the larger framework have happy endings or even any kind of ending.  Because of the framing airport scenes, there is a sense of completion.

Hugh Grant plays the newly elected Prime Minister. On his first day at 10 Downing Street, he meets a member of his new staff that not only catches his attention but makes him think that maybe she could be the one for him. Not a great time to fall in love and not the thing to do when you’re trying to run a government and are under continuing scrutiny.

Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman play a couple who are comfortable or maybe too comfortable with each other–especially when a new employee at his firm seems to be offering more than just excellent administrative skills. Sarah, another employee of the firm is in love with the Chief Designer but does he return her affection? And who is it that keeps calling Sarah. Is it guilt, duty and/or love that keeps her from having a life of her own.

Mark and Peter are best friends and Peter is getting married to Juliette. Peter knows that Mark doesn’t care for Juliette. Juliette is trying her best to be friendly. When the professional videotape of the wedding turns out blue, Juliette asks for Mark’s tape and learn something that surprises her.

Bill Nighy turns in an excellent performance as an over-the-hill rock star making a desperate attempt to make a come back and he’ll succeed if only he can get the spot of number one Christmas song of the year. His over-the-top performance playing the role as someone who has nothing to loose and therefore telling the unvarnished truth is reminiscent of Bullworth.

Daniel is a newly widowed step-father trying to find someway to connect with his eleven-year-old stepson, Sam. These scenes really show what it’s like to be a dad, not necessarily a father (biological) but a dad with all the meanings of that word.

There’s a couple of more stories. They all seem to intertwine in one way or another. After a few viewings, you notice that there the various characters show up in the background or in short bits during the other characters story arcs. All in all, there’s a lot going on. I laughed. I cried. I sang along with the music. In other words, the movie made me feel for the characters and remember similar though different events in my life. Most of all I was enraptured and entertained and reminded that love is all around us all the time, we just sometimes forget to look for it.

Today was a day of surprises. I woke up to find Hyperion already out and about. He heard me moving around and said to come out on the landing. I did. What did I see? The Christmas tree just infested with tigers holding signs.

You see, along with collecting bears, we also have a fair collection of tigers (most from the same company). Some friends also have collected animals and we often will put them in situations and take pictures and share them around. So, somehow the tigers managed to print off signage, climb the tree with their signs and then go teddy for the day. (You know that stuffed animals have to always stay put when in the presence of people; a state that is called “going teddy”. That’s why you have to take pictures of them when they do things like this — of course, we keep hoping we’ll catch them at it someday but so far tigers — lots of points,  and all us humans — zip.

We’re having a quiet Christmas watching Christmas movies, reading, talking and just enjoying each other’s company. Friends called earlier with good wishes. I sent out email wishes to friends today. My son just called — he’s also having a great day.

I hope that all of you reading this blog are having a great day of joy and laughter.

It’s finally here — Christmas Eve and I’m all a twitter with excitement. I love Christmas, it’s my favorite holiday. I also love the artwork of Mary Englebreit, it makes me think of loving people, small towns, knowing all your neighbors, watching out for those around you, and just being the way life should be — or the way we wish it was only with all the conveniences of now. Anyway, we now have this flag at the end of our driveway. We took down the other flag we had to put this one up. I’ve been looking for this particular flag for a couple of years and had just about given up. But, I found it in our local Home Depot when I decided to take another look in case there was something more to my liking than the usual snowmen, poinsettias, and pine trees decorated in the wild. I just spent about thirty minutes trying to find a website that sold this flag so I could point to it but could not find one — Amazon didn’t even have it (which explains why I looked for it for so long).

I love this visual because I believe. Yes, there is a Santa. If you doubt it, you should read (or reread) Francis Pharcellus Church’s answer to Virginia O’Hanlon’s letter to the editor of the New York Sun. Virginia’s question was:

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Church’s complete answer may be found here at the Newseum site. But the part that has always stayed with me and brings tears to my eyes whenever I read it is this paragraph:

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

I love Christmas not for the gifts, I don’t even care if I get any. I love it because it seems that, barring a few incidents (think Walmart stampede), Christmas is a time when people on the whole forget to be afraid of one another. People smile at you and nod a greeting when you walk on the sidewalk. The clerks in stores seems to actually recognize that there is a customer before them and make eye-contact and wish you a happy holiday. Everyone seems just a bit friendlier and kinder and more concerned for their fellow human than during the rest of the year. If only we could keep the good spirits of Christmas all year long this world would, in my opinion, be a lot better off.

So, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas or whatever flavor of this holiday season that you celebrate be it Hanaukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or some variation I’m not aware of. All of these holidays have the common believe that people should be kind to each other, families should gather to celebrate and give thanks for their blessings. So, blessing and best wishes for all.

And because I so enjoy tracking Santa’s progress during the evening on Christmas Eve, I thought that those of you with children (or who are young at heart) and who do celebrate Christmas may want to check out NORAD’s Tracks Santa 2008. (Remember to turn on scripts if you have them turned off). Enjoy your evening — I plan watch A Muppet Christmas Carol and other Christmas movies and spot check Santa’s progress.

Merry Christmas to All and to All a good night.

We were walking through Sam’s Club and a movie was playing on the big screen TV in the Blu-Ray section. There seems to be a weird back and forth with a woman on a computer and a young girl and the same man was in the background of both scenes talking to them. Hmmmm, looked interesting. We stood there for a few minutes until someone said “Nim” and we realized it was Nim’s Island. Checking out the movie section, we found that there wasn’t a copy for sale — not actually surprising just before Christmas so we went home and put it on our Netflix list and popped it to the top.

The movie, directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, stars Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler, Abigail Breslin, Michael Carman, Mark Brady, and others. The basic premise is that Nim lives with her marine biologist father, Jack, on an island in the South Pacific. They don’t let anyone know where the island is, even going out in their boat to meet the ships bring supplies. Jack goes out to a small atoll to collect specimens while Nim remains behind to make sure her friend the turtle’s eggs hatch and the babies survive. A huge storm comes up and Jack doesn’t come home as expected in two days. Meanwhile, a cruise ship approaches the island and the adventurer Alex Rover contacts Jack via email to ask about their volcano. Nim and Jack are fans of the Alex Rover novels so this gets Nim excited and she asks Alex for help. But Alex is a character in the novels written by Alexandra Rover who lives in San Francisco and is agoraphobia. Pathos, comedy, adventure, and a darn good movie ensues.

The movie is loosely based on the book, Nim’s Island by by Wendy Orr and illustrated by Kerry Millard. It seems to me, reading the book’s description, that the movie probably adhere more to the spirit rather than the letter of the book — but that’s just a guess since I haven’t had the pleasure of reading the book — yet.

Anyway, what I found interesting is the back and forth between Alex Rover, the fictional male adventure hero and Alex Rover, the writer of the character, and between Nim and Alex Rover the writer who she thought was the adventurer. The movie had so much going on that after watching it three times, I could have watched several more but had to send it back.

The director’s played the imagination of the characters wonderfully. Nim’s friends are a seal, a bearded dragon, a turtle, and a pelican. She has a very active imagination and a self-reliance very advanced for an eleven-year-old. She’s always active and never bored. When the new Alex Rover novel comes, she immediately dives in and we have a wonderful scene of her curled up in bed reading and the room disappears and she’s suddenly on the bed in the middle of the desert and the book’s action is going on all about her. On the other hand, Alex Rover the novelist actively talks to and interacts with her creation Alex Rover the adventurous hero of her books. We see her with all her neuroses and fears and yet when Nim calls for help, Alex goes to her aid.

It could be trite and all heartwarming but there a lot more going on that you’d expect. I’m sure children will enjoy the story at it’s surface level but there’s a lot more going on in the visuals as Alex travels to help Nim and Nim struggles to help herself survive while dreading the loss of her father. Do yourself a favor and if you can suspend belief and just enjoy, watch Nim’s Island. I think you’ll find it well worth the time.

While I’m sure this comes as no big question to professional mathematicians, I’ve never come to an understanding of the nature of infinity. The question that came up this evening while sitting at a traffic light was: if the set of integer numbers is infinite, and the set of real numbers is infinite, and integers are a subset of real numbers, then isn’t one infinity larger than the other? Furthermore, if you subtract the integers from the reals, you still have an infinite set left over. Now take the numbers X/10, where X is an integer. There’s an infinite number of them too. And X/100, X/1000, on and on with increasing powers of 10 in the denominator. Obviously, there’s an infinite number of them as well. Plus X/2, X/20, X/200, X/3, X/30, X/300, etc etc etc. No matter how many infinite sets you take out, there’s still an infinite number left. So doesn’t that make the infinitely large set of real numbers infinitely larger than the infinite set of integers?

So, there’s no solution here, no grand philosophy, no rant. Just the simple acknowledgment that I really don’t understand the concept of infinity, and I wonder if anyone really does?

Today, this article in New Scientist caught my eye. It seems that after studying the phenomena scientists believe that lightning during a snow storm, which is a very rare event (called thundersnows), indicates that a blizzard is coming. The more lightning the stronger the blizzard.

I’m originally from Maine and I think I’ve only seen/heard of thunder and lightning during a snow storm maybe twice in all the time I lived there. Both times the snow was just incredible afterward. Guess I never put the two events together. The articles says that it only gives about a short warning of the blizzard but some warning is better than the current “eye-witness” weather reports.

Predicting weather is getting better all the time but there’s still a long way to go to be totally accurate. The longer the forecast is from the day you read about it the less reliable it is — reading Saturday’s forecast on Monday is unlikely to be more than a general tendency in the weather than an actual prediction.

But to be able to accurately predict a blizzard from the lightening may help those who have to make those decisions to open or close schools, government offices, and business. If it’s snowing fairly heavily and it starts thundering and lightning — it’s probably going to get a lot worse very soon.

I’ve been interested in trying to live off the grid for many, many years.  But as our energy and economic crises get worse and worse it gets to be more important to start the process. I found this interesting article, “How to Unplug From the Grid” on New Scientist. The article seems pretty comprehensive in a general here’s what you have to consider way.

For example:

The good news is that the energy you require is likely to be a fraction of what you presently use, says Tony Brown, head engineer at the UK’s Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth in Powys. The average UK household uses around 4500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually, plus some 18,000 kWh of gas for cooking, hot water and domestic heating. In the US the figure varies considerably from region to region. For example, households in New York City use around 4700 kWh a year, whereas those in Dallas use 16,100 kWh: there are a lot of air conditioners in Texas. In chillier regions where people use gas for heating and cooking, on the other hand, they can burn up an extra 28,000 kWh or so per household.

We looked long and hard to find just those numbers when we first were starting to learn about the possibilities. However, just about everyone says the same thing. Before going jumping in with both feet, find out how much you can cut your consumption of power. Some of the best ways to reduce your power usage (from the article):

The biggest energy savings will come from properly insulating your home to minimise heat loss. That done, you’ll need to work out what is eating up the rest of the power you consume. The easiest way to do this is to buy an energy monitor that can provide a live display of your total energy consumption or that of individual appliances (see “What’s guzzling the juice?”). This will help you focus on reducing consumption to the bare minimum, not just by switching to low-energy light bulbs and energy-efficient white goods, but also by turning unused appliances right off rather than leaving them in standby mode. With a bit of effort and investment, you should be able to get by on a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

We’ve started to do some of this. We’ve replaced as many of the light bulbs that we can reach with compact florescents or halogens (lower wattages — same brightness). We bought a door for the basement that was insulated and had insulated glass (double pane with gas between). We hope to take out the current lowest value allowed insulation in our basement and replace with the appropriate level soon — maybe this summer depending on whether we instead opt to replace our single pane windows with double or triple panes to reduce leakage.

We’ve got a long way to go before we’ve reduced what we’re currently using to reasonable levels but we’re working on it. From the article we can see that there’s more to think about and more to do.

What’s your favorite energy reduction strategies? I’m always interested in what others are doing.

And thus we see the real problem with saving energy … money. For years we’ve been able to waste energy left and right because it was cheap. Our entire infrastructure is built on the philosophy that it’s better to the burn extra power than to spend money to improve the system.  Now energy is getting more expensive, but our “cheap” infrastructure can’t just be easily made more efficient.  Then there’s the price of doing what’s right.  Gayle mentioned that we got a new door.  What she didn’t mention is that we asked about the most efficient door.  It would have been $9000 (needless to say we went with a less efficient door and a lower price we could afford).  Nine thousand for a freaking door?  It’s just a bunch of wood and glass with a bit a metal and gas tossed in.  Where does nine thousand dollars come from?  Well it comes from the fact that people that want to save the world tend to be the kind that will spend the cash to bring it about.  The others are cheap and just want a door that closes and locks.  So if people really want to save the planet, you might as well make some extra profit off of their activism.  It’s the American way, after all.  See a need, exploit a need.  Don’t stop squeezing until the pennies stop bleeding.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit pessimistic, but I’m going to be stubborn and stick with it.  So if we want to re-insulate the basement, or change out the windows, we’re going to have to be prepared to spend a good chunk of change to make it happen.  Some, but not all of these changes will pay for themselves over time with reduced energy costs.  Some won’t.  But if you don’t have the money to spare right now, you can’t save money over the long haul, and will end up spending a lot more in the end.  And meanwhile the DVD player keeps blinking 12:00 (not ours but others — but that’s a topic for another rant).