A Curious Statistical Anomaly

This is our weekend. Last night was WSFA’s 3rd Friday Meeting in DC. It takes us slightly under two hours to get there and another to get back. So, we were home by about 2:30 a.m. Of course, we slept late.

Up late. Made breakfast. Finally got the Banana Pecan Muffins made. Then down to the mailbox for the paper and mail. Put some food in the bird feeder. Headed out to do the shopping.

Back home and it’s nearly 8 p.m. So, folded the wash which dried while we were out. Put it away. Skipped supper in favor of a bit of cheese and iced tea.

Picked up Blood Ties Season One. It’s a series based on Tanya Huff’s Vicky Nelson series of books. So we watched disk 1. I’m greatly pleased with the first disk of shows. Looking forward to the rest of them. Will do a review when I finish watching them.

Now it’s bed time. The weekend only has one day left and I’ve got nothing to show for it so far except clean clothes, the weekly food shopping done, and about 3 inches on my sweater (I always knit while watching shows otherwise I really wasted my time).

Anyway…two day weekends aren’t enough. Where’s those 4 day work weeks we were promised in the 60’s?  Shouldn’t they be here by now, it’s the 00’s after all. It always takes one of the weekend days to run all the errands and then the second day is for all those household chores that take two of us. Where is that day of rest thing? I think I’ve been robbed.

Do you remember being a kid and thinking, when I grow up I’ll have time to just do what I want? Being a grown up just means you tell yourself what to do all the time. I’m a real task master. Yeah, just ask me,  my boss is a real ‘nose to the grindstone’ task master. Too bad I’m self-employed. I never let myself get away with crap. Then on the weekend it’s work, work, work — only this time it’s housework and yard work, and on and on.

So, what happened to those carefree weekends we’re supposed to have? Mine got repossessed somehow.

Today’s post is a bit of whining and complaining about pain — feel free to skip.

Not really pins, but needles. Today, I saw my acupuncturist–she’s great. I always feel so much better after a treatment. This past month has been pretty much a haze of pain.

Changing weather causing migraines. A major fibromyalgia flareup. Last week I felt that I was nothing but a walking, talking ache. I felt like I should have those cartoon pain arrows all around me so people would know to stay away — potential woman on the edge!

Now I’m feeling like the pain is over there somewhere. I don’t know how far over or which there it is — but it’s not immediately here. That’s the best part of being post treatment. The worst part is knowing the next one isn’t until next month.

On pins is trying to figure out what my schedule will be for the rest of the month. I’m working to organize my work space. I’ve cleared up all the old advanced reader copies and moved them to a spot in basement. That freed up some space now on to the next phase of the organizational frenzy.

I’m instituted doing yoga and some aerobics every day. It’s Wii Fit but it’s still exercise. I started this several months ago and I’m realizing that I do see a difference in myself. It’s really helped my lower back pain. I was doing the back exercises off and on but now with the yoga, I’m finding that I’m not as stiff. The docs all say that exercise is good for fibro. It sounds totally counter-intuitive. Be in pain from every muscle in your body aching and then exercise. Yeah, that’s what I want to do. But gentle stretching and some yoga and aerobics does seem to help. I’m not into the strength training very much, at least not all the reps because that strains muscles more than I want.

We worked in the yard last weekend. We’ve got one of those huge electrical connector boxes out just across from the end of our driveway on our property. It was clear all around it for about 3 feet when we moved in. We’ve ignored it and notice that it was getting buried in the underbrush and vines (think Kudzu, and you’ve identified the vines). So we went out and cleared the area all around it again. We’re heading into hurricane and tornado season so we thought the access should be open just in case.

The problem is Hyperion now has poison ivy up and down both arms. I’ve only got a couple of small spots because my gardening gloves go all the way up to just above my elbow. So, next week I have an appointment to see the doc. By then I’ll either have the poison ivy under control — yeah, right — or be in dire need of prednisone. So, I’m covering my bases. Just when I thought it was safe to weed again. The only marginally shiny vine that wasn’t Kudzo was five leaved. So much for the beware of leaves of three rhyme. At least this year I made it to the middle of June before getting my first batch of poison ivy.

Anyone have any hints on taking care of poison ivy other than 1) a doc and prednisone, 2) Burt’s Bees Poison Ivy soap, 3) Domboro soaks, 4) washing everything you touch/wear/think about wearing so it doesn’t spread ? I’m open to hearing about them.

Tonight we watched Lady in the Water directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan and starring: Paul Giamatti, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jeffrey Wright, Bob Balaban, Sarita Choudhury, along with many others.

I really enjoyed The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, but Signs just left me wondering what the point was other than to be scary. Since Lady in the Water appeared to be marketed as horror, I decided to skip it. But, it popped up on Netflix as one of those “if you liked these you might want to try this” — so I did. Boy, am I glad I did.

Basically, the story takes place in an apartment building complex. Someone is swimming in the pool at night and the building/grounds manager, Cleveland Heep, keeps hoping to catch the swimmer. However, once he does, the swimmer submerges and doesn’t come up. He starts to run around the pool and slips and knocks himself out and falls into the pool. He comes to, to find the swimmer has carried him into his apartment — essentially saving his life. However, the swimmer is not who or what she seems. For the lady in the water is a narf named Story. It’s up the Heep to help her achieve her goal and to return to her world.

The entire movie is a story in a story in a story. The folk tale of the water people and the land people drives the film framing the entire narrative. But Heep must learn the story since Story can’t tell him anything about her world — it’s against the rules (as telling useful information so often is in these types of folk tales).

Most of us grew up listening to and then reading fairy tales and legends ourselves. Many of those stories teach morals or behaviors or lessons, a carry over from our oral traditions of years gone by. But the stories that resonant with us and that we remember vividly are those that touch our hearts. In Lady in the Water, Heep calls together a varied group that are touched by this story and want to believe. The film touches that part of us that wants to believe in good triumphing over evil, or at least breaking even. That each person can find their purpose and accept the responsibility of stepping up to be the person they were always meant to be.

We can’t all be princes or princesses in disguise and that wasn’t the point of those tales of orphans finding out they were special. It’s that each of us is special and not in the way we seem to have now, of everybody being special so that no one is. No, everyone is special, but were not all equally gifted — someone may be a gifted dancer and the rest of us can barely walk and talk at the same time without falling over. That’s doesn’t make us klutzy ones less, it just means that physical coordination is not our gift. Everyone, no matter how common and ordinary, has a purpose in life. Some of us might find that purpose and some of us may never make the effort to examine our own skills and abilities to find that uniqueness that makes us special.

In Lady in the Water, a group of ordinary people come together to help someone. They are told that only they can help, and that they have a role to play in saving Story. They may not totally believe in her story but they are willing to help. Nevertheless, they take a stand to help someone in need. A person they don’t know in a situation that is frankly unbelievable.

Should the human race be saved? Some days when I watch the news I wonder if maybe we should just give the Earth a break. On other days, I can see the spark that makes humanity definitely worth saving. It seems that crises and upheaval bring us together to help others in a way that peace and prosperity don’t.

Lady in the Water makes a clear case for the inherent goodness within the heart of man. It’s a movie that definitely will be bought and added to our watch many more times collection. I hope, if you haven’t seen it yet you’ll give it a try.

Time is finite. There’s 24 hours per day or 1440 minutes or 86400 seconds. Of course we’re supposed to sleep at least 8 of those hours. So basically each day we have 16 hours or 960 minutes or 57600 seconds to do stuff. That stuff includes making meals, cleaning the house, taking care of hygiene issues, work hours, and leisure time.

Now it sort of sounds like that’s plenty of time to get things done. But of those 16 hours 8 are spent working (plus the commute time for most people). Of course, I work at home so I tend to work more like 10 hours a day. Since I’m here in the house, a trip to the bathroom or to get a cup of coffee means I can toss in a load of wash or put it in the dryer when I pass, and then back to work. So some multi-tasking gets done.

Somehow, I always feel there isn’t enough time for all the things I want to do. Sometimes it’s just my subconscious making me feel like I’m not working that messes up my schedule. For example, I often feel that the time I spend sitting and reading is not working and I should get back to work. But reading books, to then write reviews of them, is working. It’s just that old New England work ethic that makes it feel that if it’s also enjoyable and fun, it can’t be work. Often, I have to keep reminding myself that reading IS work and it’s okay to just sit and read. But when I’m sitting by the window listening to the birds and enjoying a cuppa and taking notes on a book, it’s just too much fun — can that really be work? Well, when the reviews aren’t written because I didn’t finish the books — that’s definitely not fun. But how do you convince yourself that an enjoyable activity is also work?

Then I want to do some knitting. I’ve got lots of started projects and I’m trying to finish some of them off because I want to start new ones. So, I’ve been committing one hour or so a day to knitting on a project to finish it. Again I feel like I’m wasting time…I’m not. I know I’m not — but, it somehow feels like I am. So, since a lot of my time is spent online reading emails, answering questions, and adding stuff to the databases, I’ve taken to keeping my knitting handy so that if the response time is slow, I knit in order to keep myself from hitting random keys trying to make the thing move faster….. I know it doesn’t do anything but lock up the entire keyboard, but I’m the impatient sort. So I’m starting to keep knitting handy (I used to play games but that eats up time beyond what the delay takes so I’m off that now).

Some people just seem to get so much done in the same amount of time. I wonder how they do it. Some people think I do an amazing amount of stuff in the time available to me. Unfortunately, I feel like I waste an awful lot of my allotted time.

Is time management really just a perception problem? I don’t know, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. How do people allocate their time to make sure the have a good mix of work, play, and sleep? Time for family. Time for fun. Time for themselves. Time for work. Time’s finite but we all use it differently. We all perceive it in a different manner. Time fleeting. Time dragging. Time passing us by. But is there a way to use it up wisely and to the best advantage without waste or regret?

Any tips on organizing your time that you want to share?

Capclave is the annual convention put on by WSFA (Washington Science Fiction Association) in October. In 2009, the Capclave Chair is Bill Lawhorn. The convention will be held 16-18 October 2009 with Guests of Honor Harry Turtledove and Sheila Williams. The convention will be held in the Hilton Washington DC/Rockville, Executive Meeting Center, 1750 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland 20852. Check the convention webpage for complete information.

Yesterday was a meeting of the Capclave committee. What was discussed was how to spread the word about the convention and brainstorming ideas for publicity, programming, and some of the other tasks that need to be done. As you know the economy hasn’t been too good over the last couple of years and trying to come up with the right mix of guests and programming to encourage people to come and have fun, learn about writing, and meeting a lot of people who enjoy reading science fiction and fantasy is not easy.

Registration numbers are okay and so far on target, but we certainly would be happy to have more people sign up and come to the convention. Check the website — we’ve got some awesome guests.

One of the benefits of coming to Capclave for people who want to learn about writing is that Capclave offers several workshops. The workshops are free to Capclave members but do require that people sign up ahead of time so the workshop leaders know how many to expect and so we don’t overbook the rooms. There’s no extra charge for the workshops and many are an hour or half-day so you don’t miss the rest of the convention either.

So, please, check out our webpage. And let me know what you think? Would you come to such a convention if it was near you and you enjoyed science fiction and fantasy books and short stories? What would make you want to attend a convention of this type?

Maybe it could be a song, I haven’t slept much in during the last two nights. I spend time in bed, but just don’t manage to drop down deep enough in sleep to dream. I toss and turn and turn and toss and finally get up and read or watch something. Sometimes I really wish I had something that showed — some problem so that people could look at me and think: she’s in pain, let’s go easy on her. But I don’t.  I look healthy. Even when on that blasted scale of pain from 1 to 10 when the pain is a 7 or 8, I look perfectly normal. I’ve learned to hide mostly.

My poor husband puts up with the whimpers and the tears. He tries to comfort, but it’s now day three of pain level 6 or 7, and I’m beginning to wonder if the the pain itself is driving the new pain. I don’t have any pain meds left that work on this. I’ve got Imitrex nasal spray and last night, since I had a whopping migraine on top of the muscle aches, I used it. So after the Imitrex and 7 extra-strength Tylenol, I managed to get 2 1/2 hours of sleep.

I’m whining. I know I am. But I’m sick of the American medical system that ignores people in chronic pain. If I hear “Go to your happy place” or “you don’t need pain medication, you just need to change your attitude”, I’ll scream. I’d like to say: let me take this hammer and smash it into your hand with all my might, then you can go to your happy place and adjust your attitude, but for heaven’s sake don’t take any pain meds because that’s a crutch and it might be addicting.

I’m going to have to ask for pain meds again on my next doctor’s visit. My last Rx ran out over a year ago and I’ve been very sparing on the last 30 pills. I’m not in the market to get addicted. I just want a good night’s sleep once in a while. When the pain level is around 4, I usually can handle it, but these last few days are making me feel like something the cat dragged in after a particularly energetic bout of “play”.

So, I hate to be such a wimp but gee, I got to vent sometime to someone. Doesn’t make me feel any better physically, but I do feel better emotionally. So, just how do you handle pain without pain killers? Grit your teeth. Find a happy place. Beg for medication. Sit in the dark and cry? Just wondering how other fibromyalgia, migraineurs, or just people living with chronic pain cope.

I’m probably one of the last people to get to see Hancock. We watched it as a play now on Netflix. I can’t comment on the clarity of the sound or the picture — remember Netflix insists that you use IE to watch their movies and there’s very little control on the viewer’s side (personally, I think Netflix should take a look at Hulu with their use any browser, clear sound, crisp pictures — I can even read the credits; can’t on Netflix — and sometimes closed captioning.

Anyway, I’d seen clips and it looked like it would be fun. Hancock stars Will Smith, Jason Bateman, Charlize Theron, Eddie Fernandez, and Johnny Galecki among others. Never could resist a Will Smith film and this was worth watching. Basically, Hancock (Smith) is a superhero who is, in all honesty, a jerk. He’s a drunk with anger management issues and he gets the job done but with no care what so ever about collateral damage as long as the bad guys get caught. Along comes Ray (Bateman) a PR guy who wants to make the world a better place, and convinces Hancock that he doesn’t need to be a jerk — he can be loved and respected and sets out to change him. Mary (Theron), Ray’s wife, thinks Hancock may be a lost cause.

That’s the bare bones, no spoilers, outline. Berg manages to have a goodly number of twist on this tale and things are not as the audience originally thought. Hancock is rude, sloppy, crude, and a drunk with tremendous power. He does his job but everyone hates him and he doesn’t fit in — he’s alone. One of a kind. He hasn’t got any connection to the people he’s helping. He has no memory of who he is or how he got to be the way he is. Can he change his attitude and become a better person?  Ray thinks he can.

On one level this is a film about connections and belonging. Hancock can see those connections but he doesn’t feel them and Ray makes him believe that maybe he could be different. Of course that doesn’t mean he’s going to change overnight. There are some truly funny moments in the film.

There’s also an undercurrent of “what are you willing to do for love”? Most of us think that we’d do anything for the people we love, but would we? Would we give them up and walk away if it meant their happiness? What we really mean is that we’d do anything to be with the ones we love — but if keeping them safe and healthy meant stepping away — that’s where most of us would have to really examine just how deep our love goes. Hancock wants to find a place for himself. He wants to understand who he is and where he comes from. He wants to be more than he is — a superhero with attitude. Once he comes to learn more about himself, he has to make some hard choices and decide who he really is.

Somehow, this superhero, comic summer film has a lot more meat on it that was expected. But it’s still plain good fun. You don’t have to appreciate that there’s more to it than the surface explosions and action sequences. It works on several levels. Some of the scenes that I was looking forward to from the clips turned out to be in the film as YouTube videos and not really all that easy to see (at least in the resolution of NetFlix via IE — but that’s the medium. Guess we might buy the DVD afterall — someday when it shows up in the sale bin.

I read the reports about how awful piracy is for the the artists who create the intellectual properties that are downloaded or copied.  Then there’s the “Don’t steal our property” commercials and the lawsuits by RIAA and MPAA and similar or related international agencies.  However, I’ve long suspected the numbers that these groups float around regarding the loss of monies due to downloading.  This article in the Guardian by Ben Goldacre (Friday 5 June 2009), actually tracked down the genesis of one of those sets of numbers. He found that the numbers referred to were actually from a one page press release and not from a scientific study as was implied in their presentation.

I’m not surprised. I’m sure piracy goes on and that movies and music are being ripped off, but this is usually by big businesses who stamp out thousands of copies and sell them very cheaply. In fact, we don’t go after them or actually prosecute — or at least not to the degree that the various governments go after college students and individuals. I suspect the reason is because money changes hands and monies are paid into coffers somewhere that make it worth while to look the other way.

Okay, I’ll admit to being a cynic with regards to this topic. I’ve read enough of the online copies of testimony and trials to believe that lawyers and judges seldom know what they’re talking about. Expert witness (usually on the side of the victim in the suit — the college student or individual being sued by the corporation) are indeed experts and put forth their finding clearly, succinctly and with examples and statistical analysis backing them up. On the other hand the expert witness put forth by the corporation bringing the suit are almost exclusively NOT experts. By their own testimony they don’t do the research themselves, can’t explain the results, and bluster when pressed for details. What this country (USA) needs is expert witnesses who work for the judges to explain to them the merits of the testimony of expert1 vs expert2 vs known research in the field. Sometimes the cases, from reading transcripts, are truly cut and dried and the judgment is — surprise — totally opposite of what one would expect.

The point is that people have an inherent concept  of intellectual property and actual most respect it, and have no intention of stealing an electronic version of a work. The problems arise when common sense and law doesn’t agree. People (and I’m using this generic term because it’s a collective term) believe that when they buy a music CD, video tape, or DVD, that they own it. Thus they feel that they can watch it on any machine they want to. They also feel that since they own, say a music CD, that they should be able to rip the songs off it and play them on their MP3 player while they’re away from their CD player since they own it and they can’t listen to both at the same time — so that it’s okay to do this.

MPAA and RIAA, for example, believe that you don’t own the CD, DVD, or whatever.  They claim that you just bought a license to use it in the manner that they deem appropriate. As you can see this is the basis of the problem. If what a person buys doesn’t belong to them and they can’t use it as they see fit why bother to buy it; or sell it for that matter.

If I rent a movie, I expect to return it without making any copy because I didn’t buy it and I don’t own it. I believe from conversations with many people that most, if not all, people feel the same. It’s not ours, we just borrowed it — like a library copy so we return it to the owner– the person we rented it from.   It makes sense.  But if you go to the store and buy a DVD or CD, you would expect that, the media being in many cases breakable, making a copy of the CD or DVD to put aside in case the purchased copy is destroyed or broken is okay. Unfortunately, the courts seem to say “No”, at least under the new (now old) Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Since you don’t own what you bought, even though you have a sales receipt — you can’t make copies or move it to another medium for ease of use. That’s counter-intuitive for many people and thus more and more people acting on common sense are actually committing crimes against intellectual property.

[Hyperion: If RIAA/MPAA didn’t act in such a counter-intuitive and heavy handed fashion, they might actually have people on their side.  Instead their flagrant violations of common sense and real world custom cause the people who understand the technology and culture to turn against them.  As someone (I forget who) said: What kind of sane business model consists of suing your best customers?]

Somehow it seems that when things go from hard copies to digital, the courts and the law don’t see them as being equivalent.  Somehow being digital makes them all nervous and scared. Then they start talking about things like digital crowbars, forgetting completely that crowbars are not illegal to own in the real world. Just because a criminal sometimes uses a crowbar to commit a crime doesn’t make everyone who owns one a criminal but the digital crowbar argument says if you own a digital crowbar you are in fact a criminal — even if you never use it to commit a crime. I have yet to hear of a lawyer bringing that point up against the digital crowbar scare tactic — though maybe I missed it somewhere.

My belief is that people are basically law abiding and that they use internalized morals to determine their behavior. I think the courts have been bamboozled into believing that piracy, intellectual property theft, and loss of revenues is far larger than it really is, because they have been lied to or mislead by agencies who cheated by not doing the research they purport to have done or who have knowingly supplied incorrect numbers and statistics to bolster their arguments.

In most documented cases, a person downloading a copy of a movie from a site, wasn’t going to buy it anyway. If you look at who is being taken to court, they’re usually low income persons who can’t fight back. I’ve yet to see them go after the big pirates — no they have money, lawyers and can fight back. (Cynicism again, yeah big time.)

In most of the cases (found and investigated by real researchers), it’s found that people who downloaded something illegally either then bought the movie or CD or got rid of it because they didn’t like it. Net result is that it wouldn’t have been a sale anyway (or there was actually a sale). I would imagine that most of the people who have a NetFlix subscription or belong to one of the movie rental places do so for the same reason. Why buy something you haven’t seen and don’t know if you’d want to see it over and over again.

In fact most reports show that RIAA’s bottom line has gone up since file sharing sites started having musical downloads. Why?  Because more people bought the music that they heard. There is a reason why music stores have those earphones and places where you can hear snippets of the music you are thinking of buying.

Instead of changing their business model to take into account the way people actually purchase and use media, these corporations are trying to use the legal route to force everyone to do things as they were done before the advent of digital media. (Of course it doesn’t help that many artists who couldn’t get the time of day from these big corporations, are now, because of the internet, able to develop a following and sell their material directly to their listeners/fans.

[Hyperion: When RIAA isn’t demanding that the music be taken down, despite having no authority to represent these artist’s interests and, in fact, acting completely in opposition to said interests.  But then it isn’t about the artists … it’s about the control.  Yeah, Gayle isn’t the only cynical one in the family.   But that doesn’t mean we’re wrong.]

I still think if I buy something I own it — too bad the big corps don’t feel the same way.