A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Finally, got my act together enough to do a blog post. It’s been a heck of a week starting last Thursday when I appeared to be coming down with a cold. Then came the weather changes and the migraines to put the cherry on top. The last two days I’ve actually felt human again and have started to get caught up on the job stuff, the volunteer stuff and my stuff.

This month’s coffee cup, I’ve had for a while. It’s sort of a girly tea-time cup and saucer but I wasn’t feeling well and I thought why have things if you never use them. I enjoy utility matched with beauty or silly or fun. So, I washed it out and started using it. The words around the edge say “Home is Where Heart Is” and the design is by Mary Englebreit. I love her artwork — it’s so bright, alive, funny, and homey. I usually get a big calendar for the kitchen and a small one for the desk. This year I also got a small one in a folder for my purse (my PDA died a while back and hasn’t been replaced and the blackberry and their ilk don’t really seem to be built for people who wear reading glasses who might not have them on all the time.

I digress. The only problem with this cup is the size — it means multiple trips to the coffee pot (and I only have half a pot each day). Smaller cups also mean they cool faster too. But drinking out of it makes me smile and I love putting it down with a quiet clink into the saucer. So, I’m a happy person this month.

I’m also in my copious amounts of free time — NOT — working on a sock. I’ve had this sort of vision in my head and I’m trying to get it to translate to the knitting. So far I’m on my third try with this sock. The top looks good but when I switch to the ribbing it looks sort of okay but not great — I’m still thinking about what to do with that. It fits okay. At first I thought it would be way to big but it fits nice up the calf.

Unfortunately, the heel is a bit loose. Seems to be okay when I try it on but I won’t really know until I walk in it for a while but I’m debating now on whether to keep going or rip it out to just above the heel flap and decrease some stitches on the first row of the heel flap or narrow down just above it. It’s something I’ll need to decide on soon but after ripping it all out twice already — I can do it again.

Besides, once I get this sock all figured out the second one should be a breeze and then I’ll post the directions here so any of you so inclined can give it a try. Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a couple of knitting books to read but trying to fit them in for reading when I’ve got so many books I need to review this month is going to be a real challenge. I figure if I get all the review books done and written up I can move to one of these new books.

So, far for review in SFRevu, I’ve read The Sharing Knife: Horizon by Lois McMaster Bujold. This one ends the Sharing Knife sage and is the fourth in the series. For Gumshoe Review, I’ve read The Book of Old Houses by Sara Graves and A Veiled Deception by Annette Blair. These will be in the February issues of the zines. I’ve started Oolong Dead by Laura Childs (also for Gumshoe). At least as far as the reading goes this month, I’m having a lot of fun.

Well, I’m off to finish a chapter, have a hot chocolate, and get to sleep. Hopefully, I’ll have a dream where I figure out what to do about my sock. I’m open to suggestions — not necessarily to follow the suggestion — but to take it/them under advisement.

We went out shopping today. Saturday is the day we usually get the week’s groceries and run errands. So, in the course of doing that I happened to spot a nice looking young woman coming in from the parking lot as we were heading out. Leather jacket and large purse, nice turtle-neck sweater, jeans, and cute strappy heels at least 3 inches high maybe more.

I don’t wear heels. In fact, I trip over shadows, so heels would just add a level of danger that I’m not comfortable with. Even my dress shoes are flats. When I do get something a bit higher in the heel — well, we are talking maybe an inch and that’s without a separate heel just a wedge that lifts the heel higher than the toe of the shoe. My highest heels are on sneakers and that’s because the whole sole is so thick.

So, the upshot is that every time I see a woman in extreme high-heels, I just stand in awe that they can not only walk in them but maybe even talk on the phone carrying on a conversation at the same time. If it was me, I’d look like one of those comedy skits or that scene in Miss Congeniality where Sandra Bullock as the newly pressed and polished FBI officer comes out of the hanger looking like a million bucks and falls off her heels and lands on the ground. Later she has to hold onto things because her balance is all off — that would be me but not looking even close to the beauty of the actresses just managing the pratfalls.

A long time ago, I worked with a woman who wore heels all the time. She said her Achilles’ tendon had shortened and she couldn’t wear normal shoes. She had to have at least an 1 1/2 to 2 inches of heel or her feet hurt and she couldn’t function. Why do women do that to themselves. While I can admire the balance required to walk in them, I have to wonder why women wear them. They pinch the toes and make your feet hurt and yet women continue to wear high-high heels. Why? I’m stumped.

In fact, when women friends complain about their feet, I’ve been known to say, “Then why wear them. Get something pretty and comfortable.” The response is usually what you’d expect if you’d suddenly dropped sixty IQ points and grew a second head. Again, I’m at a loss. You see, I’ve never been a girly-girl. I always was a bit of a tomboy and boys got cooler toys. I actually preferred Lincoln Logs and chemistry sets to dolls and doll clothes. In college I was in a lot of science and technology classes … often the only woman in the class — so not being a fashion queen or even having someone to key me into the whole fashion thing, there’s a lot of things I just don’t get.

I’ll never wear high heels and don’t understand the women who do so when it causes them pain. But, I certainly have to stand in awe of their ability to balance and walk across broken gravel in shoes that see me making a quick trip to the emergency room for a broken ankle or leg.

I say “Watch the sky!” not in a The Thing or Independence Day kind of way. I’m not expecting an alien invasion any time soon. No, I’m saying it because 2009 is the International Year of Astronomy — with all sorts of events planned throughout the world.

The International Year of Astronomy website has lots of information about what they’re planning for the year. And here’s their general spiel about it:

The International Year of Astronomy 2009 is a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery.

High ideals and I don’t know how that can be accomplished but I will try to watch the sky more myself and I hope you will too.

New Years’ Eve, we worked until after midnight getting the zines up. Then, a bit wired, we decided to walk down to the mailbox (1/4 mile away). It was cold and windy so we really bundled up. Woo hoo it was cold. But all bundled up it wasn’t back except for the bits without covering like my eyes and cheeks. Yeah, I grew up in Maine, but I’ve lived in Maryland enough years to make me a cold-weather wimp.

What I remember most, other than the cold, is that after we came out of the trees on our property, our neighbor has trees on one side of the dirt road and big fields and her house on the other side. The sky was pitch black with no clouds at all — might have been wisps but I didn’t notice them. Orion was so bright and sharp you could easily follow his belt stars up to the Seven Sisters. Hyperion picked out constellations for me and I swear with the naked eye you could see the difference between a blue and a red star. Jupiter was so bright that at first I thought it might be the North Star. We stood and just marveled how beautiful the sky was and wasn’t it too bad that the best viewing was so late at night when all the ambient lights of houses, cars, whatever are out. It’s a sight I won’t forget — it’s one of those moments in life that make a memory to be cherished.

So that’s why a saw “Watch the Sky!” Make your own memories of beautiful star-filled skies. Perhaps you might want to wait until it’s a bit warmer — but still — look up in wonder now and then. Find a book and learn one or two of the constellations. Make it a family project. Or just enjoy a quite moment of contemplation.

I ran into this extremely interesting article on Scientific American online called, One World, Many Minds: Intelligence in the Animal Kingdom by Paul Patton. Scientists, or rather neuroscientists and psychologists, believed that the brain developed over time and as life forms became more complex and sophisticated the brain got more sophisticated also — that’s an extremely gross exaggeration but just about right. In other words, humans were the top of the ladder and that’s just the way things were. There was also the side idea that somehow we still had all the other lower levels of development but just added to them to get our wonderful brain and cognition and intelligence and all the other materials for right thinking.

The article basically says:

# The brains of other animals are not merely previous stages that led directly to human intelligence.
# Instead—as is the case with many traits—complex brains and sophisticated cognition have arisen multiple times in independent lineages of animals during the earth’s evolutionary history.
# With this new understanding comes a new appreciation for intelligence in its many forms. So-called lower animals, such as fish, reptiles and birds, display a startling array of cognitive capabilities. Goldfish, for instance, have shown they can negotiate watery mazes similar to the way rats do in intelligence tests in the lab.

Now this is something, that I find myself thinking — it’s about time. When I was taking neurology, I often thought that some of the basic premises didn’t make sense. And over the years, I’ve noticed that the basic list of skills required to be called sentient seems to change every times some scientific discovery shows that an animal of whatever species or description possess one of the criteria for intelligence — the criteria gets changed. For example: tool using used to be one of the criteria for intelligence. Then when it turned out that quite a few animals, and even some birds use tools (some even make them to be used), that criteria bit the dust.

I found the entire article just fascinating especially the information about octopuses:

Behavioral studies show that octopuses can distinguish and classify objects based on size and shape, much as rats do. They can learn to navigate simple mazes and to solve problems, such as removing a tasty food item from a sealed container. In 1992 two Italian neuroscientists, Graziano Fiorito of the Dohrn Zoological Station in Naples and Pietro Scotto, then at the University of Reggio Calabria in Catanzaro, published surprising evidence that an octopus can learn to accomplish a task by watching another octopus perform it. They trained octopuses to choose between a red ball and a white ball. If the octopus opted for the correct ball, it got a piece of fish as reward. If it selected incorrectly, it received a mild electric shock as punishment.

Once the training was completed, the investigators let an untrained octopus watch a trained animal perform the task from behind a glass barrier. The untrained animals did monitor the trained animals, as indicated by movements of their head and eyes. When allowed to select between the two balls themselves, the observer octopuses then made correct choices, which they could only have learned by watching. The ability to learn by studying others has been regarded as closely related to conceptual thought.

Maybe more research into the area of comparative neuroanatomy will show that while we may not be able to converse with an octopus, whale, dolphin, goldfish, ape, or bird — they may not be as “lower” class in the conceptual thought processes as we once thought. However, this also raises some very interesting philosophical questions if we learn that inhabitants of this planet (not humans) are capable of conceptual thought and cognitive abilities.  Do we have the right to experiment on them or … eat them?

Think about it for a minute. If some super-intelligent being came from out of nowhere and decided because our brains didn’t work like theirs that we were not worth bothering with except as pets, food, or work animals — we wouldn’t like it very much. Do we have the right to do the same to those creatures on our planet?

We’re starting to move off our little planet and there is the chance, even though it is considered minuscule, that we could meet intelligent life out there. However, if every time we find evidence of intelligence in something “not us” here on Earth we change the definitions to eliminate all the “not us” creatures — how can we truly be open-minded enough to recognize that intelligence if we find it.

I’m not about to turn vegetarian — or at least not completely — but these are the sorts of questions that I think about. And, I think more people should be thinking about these issues too. Our technology and science is getting to the point where the ethics of whether we should do something is going to be as important as can we do something. But, I’m not talking about the knee-jerk ethical babblings we seems to be having now, but true discourse on the issues discussing the ramifications for us, our society, our laws, and our humanity.

When Gayle talked about aliens appearing, it made me think. Isn’t that the exact plot line to an untold number of science fiction moves? Aliens arrive and treat us like animals. And so we have to fight back against these “monsters”, to teach them that we’re worthy of respect. Now, whether we’re talking about gorillas, dolphins, octopi, or whatever, we’ve now got a lot of evidence suggesting that these animals are not dumb. What is it about humanity that refuses to accept that there can be more choices in the world than just Animal and Human? Of course the cynic in me says that there are still plenty of humans that refuse to accept other humans as equals. This superiority complex seems to be built in at a pretty basic level. I think that’s all the more reason to expose it to the light of scrutiny and get people to at least acknowledge that the situation exists.

The year 2009 is fast approaching.  Just a bit longer and the we’ll begin fresh with another year.  Of course this New Year’s Eve will be one second longer than the last several as a leap second is added to bring us back into synch with the Earth’s rotation around the sun.  It’s the time that people make merry and make lists of resolutions that they hope no one will remember so they don’t have to keep them.  Of course some people make resolutions that they do intend to keep — I hope all those who make resolutions with such intentions manage to follow through on their plans to improve their lives.

2009 is also the International Year of Astronomy. I ran across this bit of information on the Astronomy Photo of the Day site. They also had this beautiful video of some of the wonders you can find watching the sky.

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

So, why not make one of your resolutions for 2009 to take the time to look up at the stars. Wonder at the beauty of the universe and the fragility of our place within it. Learn to recognize some of the major constellations. The universe is grand and our solar system is such a tiny bit in a very large sea.

Me. My plans are to write more, read more, exercise, and enjoy every minute of every day with my full attention. Carpe Diem.