A Curious Statistical Anomaly

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.

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.

It’s me again. A couple of days ago Gayle mentioned here that we were looking for a tree topper. There appears to be two types commonly available: The Angel, and the Star. So far, none of them of really appeal to us. For me, the angel is really a non-starter. I’ve just never like the looks of them, and my opinion of them was warped at a young age with the story of “Why does an Angel sit at the top of a tree?” If you do a search, I’m sure your search engine of choice will serve you up a dozen variations on the theme. But this is how I remember it:

Santa is running late on Christmas Eve. All kinds of last minute things have cropped up and the normally jolly old elf is getting a bit stressed. Half his elven workforce is down with the flu, and the rest are getting clumsy with fatigue. Quality control is really beginning to slip. And don’t get him started on the temp elves the agency sent over. All in all, it’s anybody’s guess whether or not they’ll get the toys done in time. Then when he goes to check out the sleigh, he finds that someone left a garage window cracked open last summer and the sleigh is covered in snow and ice. So bad is it that he now has a team of elven mechanics working on it, trying to get the rust off. It’s unknown if the primer is going to be dry in time. Next stop is the reindeer pens, where he finds three of his team have jumped the fence and are nowhere to be found. A team of security elves is dispatched to look for them. Finally, with the clock relentless counting down to launch time, the first bag of toys is hauled from the toy shop to be loaded on the sleigh. One of the elves slips on the ice, the bag is dropped, rips open, and toys are scattered across the ice. A clean-up team is called to get everything repacked. The security team reports that they’ve located the missing reindeer, but it’s going to take another half-hour to get them back and in the harnesses. And, there are whispers being passed around that two of the reindeer might be pregnant and will need to be replaced for this year’s run. A physician elf is called to check them over. With time to leave only minutes away, Santa stamps back into the house, the red in his cheeks no longer caused by the crisp clean air. No sooner has he closed the door when Mrs. Claus cheerfully informs him that her parents will be visiting for Christmas day (and the next two weeks.) While he’s still spluttering to this news, the doorbell rings. Nearly incoherent, Santa turns around and rips open the door. On the step is a little angel, sweet as can be and precious as the morning dew. Behind her is the new Christmas tree he had order two months previously. “Merry Christmas, Santa!” she says, with a twinkle in her eye. “I have your tree here, where would you like me to stick it?”

And that’s why there’s an angel on top of the Christmas tree.

Now I can’t see an angel tree topper without laughing. It’s not considered conducive to the Christmas spirit, so I try to keep it to myself, but for my own personal (well, shared with Gayle) tree, I’d like something more heart-warming then side splitting. What can I say? I’m easily amused. Anyway, the search goes on.

Greetings to all you fans of “A Curious Statistical Anomaly”. In addition to the many other bits of fluff that have caught Gayle’s eye, I was lucky enough to attract her attention twenty years ago and convince her that marrying me would be a good idea. I generally lurk behind the scenes, but Gayle has been pointedly hinting that perhaps I should write a few entries myself. As a guy, I can be pretty oblivious to such subtlety, but I guess there are limits that even I have to respect. It’s not that I don’t like posting, it’s just that once I do, it’s the first step towards a tradition. And as a confirmed procrastinator, I live by the motto: “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can put off until next week”. The Canadian Lynx to the left is my avatar. I’ll be using him so that there will be no confusion as to when I write a post and when she does. Although, our styles are sufficiently different that I wouldn’t think telling us apart wouldn’t be that difficult.

So, what do I bring the this blog? What interests me? These are both excellent questions. I’m glad you asked. Like Gayle, I’m interested in a variety of things, but mine are more science and technology related. Gayle likes to tell you what’s on her mind. I tend to rant about things I don’t like. There were a couple of possibilities that I’ve come across: There’s the JPL employees that are being required to sign away their right to privacy. And there’s the new legislation that would make open WIFI providers responsible for the content that flowed over their networks. Both are rant worthy, and I might come back to one soon. But today, I’d just like to tell you a couple of things about my job. I’m a computer programmer by trade, working for a small company that subcontracts to a bigger company that subcontracts to the government. That makes me a pretty small fish in the corporate hierarchy, but it puts me in the position to see some of the insanity that Scott Adams uses to make Dilbert such as success.

We have a cooperative agreement between our agency and another, somewhat related, one and right now we’re having a bit of a hardware issue that’s brought everything we do to a screeching halt. Fortunately for us, the problem is with the other guys, so we’re just twiddling our thumbs waiting for them to fix whatever it is that broke. I got a call today from my counterpart over in the other agency telling us that they were keeping their heads down for a while. It seems someone in my agency called my counterpart’s boss’ boss’ boss to ask what the ETA was for getting the issue resolve. Problem is that apparently nobody had bothered to tell the B’B’Boss about the issue and he was more than a little perturbed to have to hear about it from an outsider. Now everybody in both agencies are trying to maintain low profiles while the bosses have meetings to discuss the matter.

The other day my company boss (to distinguish him from by project boss or my division boss) told us that the company had changed a couple of its corporate policies and that we were to go on-line and read the updates, then sign a form and hand it in to him before he left. I offered to sign it right then because I was going to be busy for a while and didn’t know when I’d get to actually read the updates. He looked at me blankly and tried to explain that I was suppose to sign it after I read the updates. I asked him if we could opt out of the policy changes. He, of course, said “no”. So I asked, if that was the case, what did it actually matter if we ever read them or not. They applied to us just the same. I think it’s situations like that that make him not want to talk to me if he can help it. He (and the rest of management) really think they’re employee friendly. And I have to say that the company’s policies and benefits are still head and shoulders above any of the other companies that have contracts here. But the fact is, the company makes whatever changes it wants, whenever it wants. We, the employees, have the choice of accepting them, or finding a new job. That’s the way it is, and I understand that. I’d just prefer they drop the pretext. It’s like the security at the airport asking if it’s okay to do whatever they want to do. Everyone knows that you’re not allowed to say no. If you want to fly, you have to let them. So why pretend that you have the choice. Why not just say, “Excuse me, but I have to …” I hate being put in situations where I have only the illusion of choice. I prefer honesty any day. Anyway, that’s my first rant.