A Curious Statistical Anomaly

War, Inc. Drected by Joshua Seftel. Actors: John Cusack, Hilary Duff, Marisa Tomei, Joan Cusack, Dan Aykroyd, and others. DVD Release Date: October 14, 2008. It’s hard to know what to say about this film. War, Inc. is definitely anti-war and is listed as such on Amazon. But it’s much more than that, which is usual with any film that John Cusack has a part in. Over the years, it’s gotten so that if Cusack is in a film we put it on our list, because while it may not always be to our taste it will definitely be worth watching and thought provoking. To give you a flavor of War, Inc., here’s the movie trailer:

War, Inc. has some similarities to Grosse Pointe Blank in that Cusack plays an assassin that’s just not getting the job satisfaction that he used to from the job. But Hauser (Cusack) has got a job to do so it’s off to Turaqistan to put an end to Omar Sharif, the politician, not the actor. Hauser, who has been wrestling with doubts and insecurities, is training himself to use hot sauce to quell his concerns. The film is, like Grosse Pointe Blank, a mix of philosophy, political comments, and believe it or not, the concerns most of us face every day. Sometimes surreal and at others laugh out loud funny, it nonetheless manages to highlight the ravages and absurdity of the war. It pokes fun at the way wars have been so sanitized that they are outsourced and used as corporate beachheads in the economics of greed. But it also deals with the people that get chewed up and spit out as they try to live their lives amidst the surrealistic landscape of war for money and profit. It’s definitely worth watching and thinking about. I’m sure the resonances with a current war that the US entered a while back and can’t seem to get out is just coincidence — or maybe not a coincidence, just taken to the inevitable extreme.

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.

As many of you know, I’m a fan of science fiction and fantasy among other forms of entertainment and enjoyment.  Usually, hubby and I attend the World Science Fiction Convention which this year will be held in Montreal and is called (this year) Anticipation.  Members of the convention get to nominate and vote for the Hugo Awards which are given out at a ceremony held at the convention.  A friend pointed me to this great article on voting for the Hugo Awards. Kate Heartfield has raised many of the issues that have niggled at me for a long time.

We attend Worldcon every year that we can manage it. We attended our first as our honeymoon — we’d gotten married the weekend before the convention. Ever since, we celebrate our anniversary by attending the world science fiction convention and we’ve only missed three since that first one. We’ll be missing Anticipation this due to a variety of events including the current economic situation in the US. This year, because we were attending members of the last convention, we did nominate for the Hugo awards but we’ll be ineligible to vote for them.

Each year it has been a bit of work to figure out what to nominate (it has to have been published or first presented during the previous year), and once the nominees are announced to gather all the works and view and/or read them. But we, as do many others, take this privilege seriously. Hugo awards are presented to the best work of the previous year. The list of winners is impressive and many of the books, stories, and media that has won has withstood the test of time and is still remembered and read by fans of the genre.

Yet, each year when the numbers are published it seems that only about five hundred people (plus or minus a couple of hundred depending on the category) take the time and effort to nominate and vote for these awards. When the convention is in the US, membership (those attending is in the thousands (4-6,000) when the convention is outside the country the numbers are fewer but still many buy supporting memberships in order to nominate or attending in order to vote (whether they attend or not). Yet the numbers who actually nominate and vote remain fairly constant.

[NOTE: I’m not bothering to look up the actual numbers. These numbers are out there in the internet but I’m going from my memory and impressions and I’m fairly sure I’m only off on specifics and it’s the generalities that I’m talking about.]

When we first started attending the conventions, we had to go out and find all the nominated works and read them and then vote. One rule we’ve had is if you don’t read/watch it you don’t vote in that category. These awards are for the best and if you don’t know that category and haven’t read in it or haven’t read anything published in the appropriate year then you can’t make an informed decision.

Over the last several years, publishers and authors have been making the works available to members of the convention so that they can read all the nominated works for free. Of course finding and viewing the nominated works in the media categories is a bit trickier but the advent of Hulu, NetFlix and other sites have made this easier also.

So, why don’t the members who are eligible nominate or vote? I don’t know. For the last several years, I’ve been asking and some of the reasons I’ve been given are:

• I don’t have time
• My vote won’t count, it’s sewn up before we even get to nominate/vote
• I’m not an expert on the field, I just read it for fun
• No one cares what I think
• I don’t read any of the people who get nominated (follow-up question: did you nominate the ones you do read — answers is usually, No, why bother)
• Why bother, the best stuff never wins (follow-up question: did you nominate or vote — answer, No)

In point of fact, these answers are pretty similar to why people, in the US at least, don’t vote in their political elections. What I can’t understand is how you can expect that your choices would ever win if you don’t bother to get out there and nominate (too late for this year) and vote. I get truly baffled by the people who say “my opinions/wishes/vote doesn’t count” and then a follow up shows that these same people don’t nominate or vote or let their opinions/wishes be known. Seems to me if you sit and do nothing, you can’t expect to have your opinion/wishes taken into account.

Many years none of my nominees make the ballot. Many years people on the ballot are ones that I’ve never read before — and who have later become favorite authors. By taking part in the process, I’ve found authors I might not have found otherwise. I’ve at least done my part to see that the best in the field gets a fair chance at the spotlight.

So, why do so few chose to exercise their option to make a difference and to celebrate the best in the field?

My husband and I have always had a soft spot in our hearts for March 14 — Pi Day (3.14…). We also get a giggle out of 3:14 if we happen to notice it — Pi o’clock. Okay, we’re definitely a geeky couple and have some strange ways of getting pleasure out of a day.

But it seems we’re not the only ones who enjoy a good math moment in our lives. CNet news reports in Politics and Law National Pi Day? Congress makes it official. The Library of Congress: Thomas has information about the law and a list of the sponsors.

It’s not going to be a national holiday or anything. It just gives the day recognition as being a bit special. So, for you geeks out there, we’ll finally have some recognition for one of our favorite mathematical and physical constants usually represented as being: 3.14159265… You can read about PI at Wikipedia. But basically Pi is

Pi, Greek letter (π), is the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi = 3.1415926535…
From: The Offical Pi Day Website

Or from the Math Forum:

By definition, pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Pi is always the same number, no matter which circle you use to compute it.

For the sake of usefulness people often need to approximate pi. For many purposes you can use 3.14159, which is really pretty good, but if you want a better approximation you can use a computer to get it. Here’s pi to many more digits: 3.14159265358979323846.

The area of a circle is pi times the square of the length of the radius, or “pi r squared”: A = pi*r^2

But for me I just enjoy the silliness of having a time of day and a day per year that manages to represent a famous mathematical and physical constant. What about you?

If you’re anything like me you probably wonder how we (meaning the country) got in this situation. Well, today I found a link to a great video by Jonathan Jarvis that simply explains the steps that got us to this national credit crisis.

Now that I’ve watched it several times, I understand the process and how it happened. But, I was always told that if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Didn’t anyone along the chain of leverage ever think about what would happen if any of the the links in the chain stopped/broke/whatever. In other words this explains the problem — investors got greedy and went for riskier and riskier investments to keep the money coming in. But, and it’s a big but — as you get riskier and riskier the chances of a whopping big crash become almost inevitable — and we’re now faced with the clean up and the holding on until things get better.

It also explains why the first “no strings attached” bail out didn’t work — they went out and just did more of what they’d done to get us in this mess in the first place hoping somehow that this time it would work. At least now it makes a bit of sense as to how it happened.

Greeting! It’s been a while since I showed my whiskers. I just wanted to add to Gayle’s post a couple of thoughts of my own on the nature of the economy. Frankly, I’m convinced that there isn’t one. No, really … it doesn’t exist. It’s vapor … shadows … a consensual hallucination that nobody dares question for fear of things like what we’re now experiencing.

Today Citibank reported that they made a bit of profit. In response, the Dow shot up nearly 400 points. Why? Has the credit crises gone away? Are all the banks lending again? Nope. In point of fact, nothing has really changed at all. So why the rally on Wall Street? Hopes and Dreams. Back last year when oil prices were climbing like a rocket, each day the price would go higher and higher, and the analysts would report that it was because the President of Iran said something, or the Prime Minister of Iraq said something else. Had anything really changed? Did it, in fact, cost one more penny to pump, refine, and transship oil? Nope. So why did the price go up? Fear. That’s right, the entire global economy is run on hopes, fears, and desires, like some magical spell out of Faerie. Companies make huge profits or go into bankruptcy based on what some stockbroker had for lunch and how his stomach feels in the afternoon.

Everyone is so busy looking for reasons why things happen, that they ignore that, most of the time, the reasons come after the event. Nobody really knows why it happened, so they just make something up so that they can make it make sense. But it doesn’t really make any sense. It’s all just a dream that everyone is too afraid to wake up from.

Now that’s not to say that events don’t have some impact, since they obviously do. Gayle’s wonderful link above explains a lot about what went wrong when people’s desire for profit got in the way of good business sense. Greed and avarice obviously still play huge roles in human behavior. But if the markets had been based on something solid and real, then this crisis could never have happened. But the continually rising price of housing served as the engine that powered the whole circuit. But why were housing prices rising? Supply and demand to a degree, but also because that’s just what housing prices do … don’t questions it, just buy buy buy and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Anyway, that’s my theory. Take it for what it’s worth, but to me, it makes more sense than an invisible hand benignly guiding the stockmarkets ever upwards.

I’ve known about the problems of wind energy and the current power grid for quite a while.  I found this article on The Energy Challenge — Wind Energy Bumps Into Power Grid Limits in the New York Times (you’ll need to login to read it). To clearly state the problem. In part:

The grid today, according to experts, is a system conceived 100 years ago to let utilities prop each other up, reducing blackouts and sharing power in small regions. It resembles a network of streets, avenues and country roads.

“We need an interstate transmission superhighway system,” said Suedeen G. Kelly, a member of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

While the United States today gets barely 1 percent of its electricity from wind turbines, many experts are starting to think that figure could hit 20 percent.

However, to achieve that 20% figure, the United States must upgrade its power grid. Over the past several years, more and more people have come to realize that our national power grid is just not up to snuff. In fact it may not even be up to a sniffle. One of the problems with wind generation is that it isn’t generated evenly throughout the day. Wind changes direction, gets stronger, lighter, and sometimes dies completely. Scientist have been working on teaming the turbines with generators that smooth out the power that is generated. However, while that solves one problem it still doesn’t deal with the fact that you still have to get the power from where it is generated to where it will be used effectively or efficiently — and that means upgrading the grid.

Part of Obama’s recovery plan, and a source of new jobs, was to upgrade the nation’s power grid. Many people complain that it isn’t necessary because we all have power, don’t we? Well, no — not all of the citizens of this country have power. But, yes most do. The problem is that for years people have been ignoring the fact that coal, oil, and carbon based power generation is relying on finite resources — folks, we’re going to run out of these raw materials. We need to switch to greener renewable energy resources — wind, solar, whatever… To do this we need to have the technological grid that can handle what we can throw at it to power our homes, factories, and tools. Upgrading the national power grid is a necessary first step.

I came across this interesting article on EarthFirst and followed the link to a similar announcement on WorldChanging. Basically, the city of Oslo, Norway is going to start running their buses on biomethane. The WorldChanging article says:

In Oslo, air pollution from public and private transport has increased by approximately 10% since 2000, contributing to more than 50% of total CO2 emissions in the city. With Norway’s ambitious target of being carbon neutral by 2050 Oslo City Council began investigating alternatives to fossil fuel-powered public transport and decided on biomethane.

Biomethane is a by-product of treated sewage. Microbes break down the raw material and release the gas, which can then be used in slightly modified engines. Previously at one of the sewage plants in the city half of the gas was flared off, emitting 17,00 tonnes of CO2. From September 2009, this gas will be trapped and converted into biomethane to run 200 of the city’s public buses.

To me this sounds like a great project. I mean really, we (meaning humans) spend billions of dollars treating our sewage and trying to find ways to make it disappear and Oslo has come up with a way to use it. It’s essentially free energy — in that the basic beginning material (and you know what it is) is certainly not going to disappear anytime soon and you have to do something with it anyway. It’s a resource that is abundant, not owned by anyone, and every city, town, village, has to come up with some way to treat it and handle it anyway. This adds a different step and violá power to run buses and other automobile.

I think every level of government that has to deal with sewage treatment should be keeping an eye on this program to see just how well it works and to begin plans to implement a similar program in their own area.

Thank you Oslo for thinking outside the box.

I’ve had a dream for at least eight years now that I’d get my country back. That our Constitution and Bill of Rights and the concepts and ideal upon which this country was founded would once again become important to the holder of the most important office our country has — The Presidency.

Today I watched the Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama. That dream became hope during his campaign and his speech today confirmed my hope and belief that finally America will be on the right track. That those hard decisions necessary to move our country forward and to maintain our ideals would be made. I now have more than a dream, I have hope for the future. Today, I am again proud to be an American. (Here’s Obama’s inaugural speech.)

We are what we imagine ourselves to be. (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)