A Curious Statistical Anomaly

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.

Today was work, work, work — getting books entered, reading for reviews, taking notes and getting set for a WSFA (Washington Science Fiction Association) Meeting in DC. For the next six month or so the club is meeting in DC … usually we meet in Virginia for the first Friday of the month, and Maryland for the third Friday.

If you live in the DC, northern VA, Maryland area and love science fiction and fantasy you should check out WSFA. You can view their website at www.wsfa.org. There’s some great people, lots of nice geeky (SF, fantasy, science, technology, and social) discussions after the short business meeting.

WSFA puts on a yearly convention called Capclave. Capclave is usually held in October. This year it will 16-18 October 2009.
Guests of Honor will be Harry Turtledove as Author Guest of Honor and Sheila Williams as Editor Guest of Honor. The convention will be held at the Hilton Washington DC/Rockville, Executive Meeting Center, 1750 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Maryland 20852.

WSFA also presents the WSFA Small Press Award at a short ceremony during the convention. This is the club’s third year giving out this award and the number of nominations are growing each year. The award honors the work of small presses and the short story (under 17,500 words).

Check out the websites to learn more about WSFA and their activities. I enjoy the people, the discussions, and the chance to get involved in the community of fans.

[Besides I needed to do a post tonight and thought I’d talk about a group that I give a lot of my time to. I’m Capclave chairperson for 2010, one of the two webmasters, and the current WSFA Small Press Award Administrator.]
So if you live in the area, come to a meeting and check us out.

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.

March came in like a lion. There’s an old saying I knew as a child:

March comes in like a lion,
and goes out like a lamb.

Hopefully, that means that the end of March will quietly meld into April. But, I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, I got a new coffee cup. This one was a Christmas gift from friends. It’s got those simple lines that I love. Again, it’s reminiscent of a type of diner coffee cup and has a nice blue line. It also says “Vote for Women” celebrating women’s right to vote. That’s a right that’s very dear to my heart making this an especially great cup.

Well, while March was coming in like that lion it roared with wind and dumped about five inches of snow on us here in Brandywine, Maryland. Not at lot of snow by the standards of some northern parts of the country but here people don’t do well with snow so five inches is a lot. In our part of the state, we usually don’t get much snow for some reason, most of the snowfall is north and northwest of DC and we’re southeast — we usually get rain when other parts of the state get snow. But not this time.

We got a bird feeder a while back because of our concern about a demented cardinal that was continually attacking our sliding glass door on the deck. The birds have been spreading the word and we’ve got quite a lot of birds eating from our feeder and we’re learning to recognize some of them. However, evidently birds go a bit wacky with snow. Maybe they think they’d better fill up on all the food they can because the feeder might go away because today we were inundated with birds.

While it’s not that unusual to see more than one bird at the feeder, today saw a lot more birds than usual. We usually fill the feeder once a day and very occasionally twice. Today, we filled it three times.

We haven’t seen much of our looney cardinal or any cardinals for that matter since we got the bird feeder. Today in the snow we saw several of them. Some down stairs on the lower patio and some on the feeder, waiting their turn or just looking like they just drifted in to make a splash of color on an otherwise  grey day. I got this fellow sitting on the railing on the upper deck.

I was trying to get a better shot of a cardinal sitting on the railing. When I clicked the shutter, I saw that another bird had come into the shot and was just off the cardinal and it looks like it’s attacking the sitting cardinal. But in truth, it just appears that way. But it was a neat shot and the wings are in motion so I thought I’d post it.

I’ve got two more picture I took today, the first is of the birds in and about our hydrangea bush down on the patio deck on the ground level of the house. I suppose I should explain that all the pictures were taken from within the house. While the glass on the doors is fairly clean it does effect the light and the clarity of the photos. In this one I also got a cardinal and a mourning dove.

To give you an idea of how patient the birds were here’s a shot of several birds waiting for their turn at the feeder.

So, even though it snowed and was cold and completely blew away my belief that the worst of winter was over. It was an absolutely wonderful, beautiful day.

Orange, a young high school student, is obsessed with an artist that lives in her apartment building. He’s always drunk. He ignores her, but she looks out for him and hopes one day he’ll pay attention. Then he comes up on the roof while she’s there. He looks at her and shows her a letter. Then he jumps from the building to land on a car below.

Orange is devastated. We then flashback five months.

Orange felt alienated and alone believing that she’s the only one to feel this way and that no one can understand her frustration, anger, and pain. She writes a note, goes up to the roof, and stands on the edge. She nearly worked herself up to jump when unexpectedly, a young man who lives in the same building is up there, drunk and the smashing of his bottle has her off the edge. It’s the same young man who we previously saw jump from the roof.

We now go forward again to that opening moment to see what happened and how these two lives intersected.

The artwork is vivid and filled with movement. There’s flashes for scenes that suggest mood, setting, movement, along with the narrative. Graphical stories are carried as much by the art as the words and when one person does both there tends to be a melding of the two.

Benjamin has produced a story that touches the pain of teens who are unsure of where they are going, what will happen as they transition from older child to an adult. As adult as they may be in their teens, they have no markers to tell them if what they’re feeling is normal or not. There’s no roadmap to adulthood, we all travel it alone. Orange, our main character, is desperately trying to make sense of a life that seems to be empty and lacking in the emotional richness she believes that others have. And then her world is shattered further by her observation of her neighbor’s suicide. It’s a difficult subject and this story gives no answers just the message you’re not alone in how you feel.

Following the story the author has several short pieces explaining some of his other work and his observations on life — mostly his life and art. After reading the additional material the raw energy of the artwork of Orange seemed more intense.

I’m happy dancing all over the house. I got my Kindle 2 in the mail today — late, very late afternoon.

Then it was Google time to figure out how to get the PDF review copies of books from my PC to my Kindle so I could read them. Many minutes/hours later, I ended up using Stanza (free download).

The resulting files aren’t the greatest but they are readable and they’re on the Kindle so I’m not tied to the PC and desk — so that’s a good thing.

Next will be to actually spend a day using it but now I’m behind schedule — again and the next two days are going to be really, really busy getting ready for the zines to go live on Sunday, March 1st.

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.