A Curious Statistical Anomaly

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?

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’ve been going through my spam again and I started to wonder about the world as spam sees it:

• No one will respect me if I don’t have the perfect watch to match my ensemble. Heck, I don’t even match my ensemble — well, maybe I do … everything works with jeans. Besides I don’t wear a watch … there’s one in my phone.
• Evidently, bank fraud isn’t a crime in the UK or Nigeria since that’s where most of the email urging me to launder money comes from.
• I can lose weight and eat everything in sight if I just use one of the 100’s of products that claim to work. If any of these products worked they wouldn’t need to advertise, word-of-mouth would sell them.
• Somehow my work experience and my college degrees are going to expire … what, the wind of forgetfulness will waft through my skull and remove my memory?
• Drugs of all kinds are available online without a prescription — so why find a dealer in your local area????
• You can make millions of dollars by sending other people money… the mind boggles.
• This week alone I’ve won at least 4 billion dollars with my email address. So send me the check already.
• I’m not going to get into the spam reportedly from women who want my body or to thank me for the wonderful night we spent together (couldn’t have been too great since I don’t remember them any of them and you’d think I’d remember at least one of the 10-30 per night.)

Personally, I find it hard to believe that Congress thinks that trying to control spam is a bad idea because it interferes with legitimate businesses. I don’t get any spam from legitimate businesses, they only send me information that I specifically sign up to get. Since a good chunk of the spam I receive every day is sexual in content, I’d think the government would more than happy to Can Spam since they’re so verbal and vocal about protecting children from sex and sexual content on the internet.  Of course these are the same people who won’t authorize a XXX domain so we can just ignore all mail or sites with that extension.

Do people really fall for this stuff? They must or it wouldn’t be so prevalent. But, I have to wonder who reads those notes about “I’m from such and such bank and we have a customer who just died with no heirs and lots of money so how about you claim to be the heir and we split the money?” Yeah, I can imagine that lots of people read that and think, “Gee, what a great idea. I must help that poor bank manager embezzle that money.”

If the world according to spam was real, it would be a shallow sad place to live.

I’m not sure how we got on the topic but, while trapped in the car for some long driving as we ran errands today, Hyperion and I got to talking about positive thinking sort of as an off-shoot of wishful thinking being related to quantum physics (which is for another post).  Anyway, in kicking this topic around I began to crystallize some of my thoughts on it.

Most people have heard of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking. The basic premise is that if you feel good about yourself, good things will happen to you or come to you. This is also the basis behind The Secret by Rhoda Byrne where your positive thoughts are like magnets that cause good things to come to you. It’s also the basis for many of the books that instruct how to use your mind to concentrate on what you want and to have what you want come true.

But what I think is that by putting yourself into that place where you are concentrating on what you want, you begin to change yourself and your attitudes. From listening to some of the people who have read these books and dedicated themselves to following the various steps, there seem to be two types of outcomes. One is nothing much happens because they wish or think positively about what they want, but then they don’t do anything but wish or think.

However, the other group not only thinks positively, but they also begin to act in ways that cause the “good” thing/event to happen to them. They take a class in adult education, local technical school, junior college, or evening college courses, or go to the library and study up on what they’re hoping to gain — which is usually, better pay, a vacation, a promotion, or whatever. It’s the activities they are performing to aid them in gaining their goal that helps to change their attitude and gain them the abilities (concrete skills) that eventually gain them their positive outcome. It’s not just the positive thoughts beamed out in the universe; it’s the positive thoughts that are beamed inward that encourage the person to take their future into their own hands and make it better.

People don’t work in a vacuum.  They are worked upon by those around them. If others don’t think much of a person, that person internalizes that and acts accordingly, believing they aren’t worth much. If the other inflates a person’s ego, they also have problems when their expectations and their skills don’t match. However, if by focusing on a goal and then working to actually bring expectation and skills into alignment, their goals are often achieved. Usually not in the manner expected, but in a manner that, in retrospect, actually is what was wanted or needed.

On the other hand, people who simply sit and wish the good to come to them and never do anything to gain that change in their lives are bound to be disappointed and always looking for the next book that might have the key that actually will work for them — as long as they don’t actually have to do more than think about it.

My grandmother used to say, “If wishes were horses even beggars could ride.” This was usually whenever, I complained about wanting something but wasn’t actually planning to do any of the work to earn it. Yes, you need positive thinking but you also need good old fashioned work to reach the goals you set for yourself.

What’s your take on this?

Hyperion here:  I freely admit to being a total muggle; sometimes even Gayle despairs at my total disdain for the other-worldly.  For all the above post, there’s a fair bit of romance in her soul.  She may not depend on the magic to do job by itself, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s none out there.  She still has hope.   But, as for me?  “There’s no such thing as magic!”  That’s just the way I’m wired.   Well, there is one exception.  I think Gayle is pretty magical … but then I’m a bit biased, and the matter is not open to scientific inquiry.

I’ve often wonder how people know things or how information spreads from one person to another.  Not so much in an educational classroom sense but those things that you pick up in daily life.  Then, the other day I ran across this article on Evolution and Facebook’s “25 Random Things”. The results of the questionnaire showed that the spread pattern of the “25 Random Things” has the same histogram chart as the spread of an infection disease.

It many ways that’s not surprising. You get the 25 things letter and it asks you to spread it to your friends who are supposed to post 25 things about themselves and forward to their friends and so on. It’s very much like the old chain letters — remember them? Well, even considering that some people don’t post their 25 things or do post and don’t forward — the spread pattern approximate that of a disease.

When you think about it. If I have a cold and then visit several friends, some will get the cold and some won’t. But those that do will visit or otherwise come in contact with other people who will either get the cold or not and so on. The same pattern of spread as an internet meme.

Richard Dawkin’s wrote about The Selfish Gene which a lot of information on memes and how they interact and work. I’ve now bumped that book up on my reading list. Soon, very soon — I’ll know more. Meanwhile, I’ll keep wondering how we pick up and process information.

Haven’t had much time to think, let alone posts.  But, my hubby found that absolutely wonderful knitting cartoon. You’ll find it Wondermark #491.

I mean really, some men just don’t understand the need for knitting.

My hubby thought I’d get a kick out of it because every trip we take, I spend more time trying to decide how much or which knitting projects to take. Then there’s the decision about what to take carry on and what to check through. If the yarn is really, really nice I hate checking it through … what if they loose my bag — it’s happened so it could happen when there’s yarn.

Meanwhile, working on getting the zines up and ready to go live on Sunday, March 1st. Desperately trying to finish up my reviews and overview of the zines in time. Also, proofing, editing, and tracking down missing content. But they’re going to be great issues.

I even had a review of my new ASUS Eee PC 1000 in TechRevu this week. Got some more things lined up to review over the coming months.

Finished one sock and I’m nearly done with the other one. Will do a photo of the pair soon. Also, got to finish my bears this weekend so will hopefully have a series of photos on making the faces and putting the arms and legs on. So, things are coming along in my universe.

I still keep missing time though. I’ve looked and looked and I can’t find the time leaks but the seconds, minutes, and hours just seem to be slipping past. So, far this month I’ve managed to keep it down to seconds and minutes rather than days and this is even a short month. I’m hoping the lost time is in a corner somewhere and with spring cleaning I’ll find it and can keep it in a bottle and pull out extra time when I need it. It’s a thought anyway.

Valentine’s Day — a day to celebrate love. Today, I did a load of wash, made a big pot of chili, hosted a Capclave PR meeting for the current chair, wished a friend Happy Birthday, finished a book I was reading (Death’s Daughter by Amber Benson — the review will be in the March SFRevu.com), and had a couple of chocolate no-bake cookies for dessert. In a way it was a day of love. Loving what I was doing and the people I got to interact with.

While I enjoy the fact that Valentine’s Day is considered a day to celebrate love and the person we love — shouldn’t we be doing that every day. When people lose someone, they don’t regret telling that person that they love and care for them; what they regret is not letting the people they care about know how much they love them. So, why don’t we make an effort to express our love every day by treating every day and every minute as if we might not get a chance to do it over because we don’t get do overs. We may have a chance to regret or to make it up to someone but we never get to relive a day and make it better. We can however, decide that each day we’ll try harder to be the person that we wish to be.

On another tangent, what is love? We say, “I love you”. But we also say, “I love this dress”, “I love summer”, and “I love chocolate” all with the same word. But we don’t love a dress, summer, chocolate, and our spouse in the same way or even with the same intensity. It’s one of those words that mean only what we want it to mean when we say it and the hearer has to figure out what that meaning is. I think the Meatloaf “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” says:

I started swearing to my god and on my mother’s grave
That I would love you to the end of time
I swore that I would love you to the end of time!

So now I’m praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don’t think that I can really survive
I’ll never break my promise or forget my vow
But God only knows what I can do right now
I’m praying for the end of time
It’s all that I can do
Praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you!!!

We often say what we think the other person wants to hear. How often have you hear someone wish Mister/Miss Right would come along and then say their dating Mister/Miss You-Might-Do for now? How many people get caught up in hormones and pheromones thinking that’s love when it’s just nature’s way of continuing the species? To often, people wake up to realize that it was all lust and not love. How do you tell the difference when books, movies, and TV make the two look interchangeable?

Then there’s the fact that so much of the babblings on love make it sound like it’s always goodness, light, and happily ever after. Usually, there’s no mention of the compromises, the 2 a.m. feedings, jobs, sickness, worry about whatever — that love is also a partnership, a sharing of the load — happiness and sadness, joy and sorrow, hope and despair, adventure and mishap — it’s not an even road but journey that is shared with one then the other taking the lead.

Just some more musing on biology, sociology, culture, and language.

I really couldn’t believe it when I read this article on PC Pro. The article said:

The three-app rule includes applications running in the background, meaning that a user running Windows Messenger and Skype, for example, could only use one further application on their machine. Antivirus software is excluded from the app count.

Microsoft says the restriction is designed to ensure that users get the best possible performance from limited netbook hardware. However, it admits it will encourage netbook manufacturers to install the unrestricted Home Premium in the UK.

Of course if you want to run more than 3 apps, and who wouldn’t, you’ll need to upgrade to the Home Premium edition of the software. I have a full-size laptop that’s over three years old that is my work horse of a machine — but it is getting old. I recently purchased a netbook for travel (Asus Eee PC). The Asus is Linux using Open Office. I saw this as a way to get myself used to another operating system — looks like I made a wise choice.

On my full-size (FS) laptop, I hardly if ever run just three applications running. I can’t imagine working with less than seven — if I had to really pare things down. Wonder how they got that magic number 3. An informal poll among a group of friends on ICQ and email (2 apps I always have open) showed that the fewest apps was 7. Hmmm, me thinks that MS did their research among non-standard computer users. My informal survey was among writers and non-computer professionals. My geek friends would have had a much higher number of apps open.

Since, Microsoft often does these little weirdnesses in marketing when they’re trying to figure if they could squeeze out more money from their users, this article makes me nervous. I hope the UK balks at this attempt to extort more money from netbook users.