A Curious Statistical Anomaly

Today was a day of surprises. I woke up to find Hyperion already out and about. He heard me moving around and said to come out on the landing. I did. What did I see? The Christmas tree just infested with tigers holding signs.

You see, along with collecting bears, we also have a fair collection of tigers (most from the same company). Some friends also have collected animals and we often will put them in situations and take pictures and share them around. So, somehow the tigers managed to print off signage, climb the tree with their signs and then go teddy for the day. (You know that stuffed animals have to always stay put when in the presence of people; a state that is called “going teddy”. That’s why you have to take pictures of them when they do things like this — of course, we keep hoping we’ll catch them at it someday but so far tigers — lots of points,  and all us humans — zip.

We’re having a quiet Christmas watching Christmas movies, reading, talking and just enjoying each other’s company. Friends called earlier with good wishes. I sent out email wishes to friends today. My son just called — he’s also having a great day.

I hope that all of you reading this blog are having a great day of joy and laughter.

It’s finally here — Christmas Eve and I’m all a twitter with excitement. I love Christmas, it’s my favorite holiday. I also love the artwork of Mary Englebreit, it makes me think of loving people, small towns, knowing all your neighbors, watching out for those around you, and just being the way life should be — or the way we wish it was only with all the conveniences of now. Anyway, we now have this flag at the end of our driveway. We took down the other flag we had to put this one up. I’ve been looking for this particular flag for a couple of years and had just about given up. But, I found it in our local Home Depot when I decided to take another look in case there was something more to my liking than the usual snowmen, poinsettias, and pine trees decorated in the wild. I just spent about thirty minutes trying to find a website that sold this flag so I could point to it but could not find one — Amazon didn’t even have it (which explains why I looked for it for so long).

I love this visual because I believe. Yes, there is a Santa. If you doubt it, you should read (or reread) Francis Pharcellus Church’s answer to Virginia O’Hanlon’s letter to the editor of the New York Sun. Virginia’s question was:

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

Church’s complete answer may be found here at the Newseum site. But the part that has always stayed with me and brings tears to my eyes whenever I read it is this paragraph:

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

I love Christmas not for the gifts, I don’t even care if I get any. I love it because it seems that, barring a few incidents (think Walmart stampede), Christmas is a time when people on the whole forget to be afraid of one another. People smile at you and nod a greeting when you walk on the sidewalk. The clerks in stores seems to actually recognize that there is a customer before them and make eye-contact and wish you a happy holiday. Everyone seems just a bit friendlier and kinder and more concerned for their fellow human than during the rest of the year. If only we could keep the good spirits of Christmas all year long this world would, in my opinion, be a lot better off.

So, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas or whatever flavor of this holiday season that you celebrate be it Hanaukkah, Kwanzaa, Winter Solstice, or some variation I’m not aware of. All of these holidays have the common believe that people should be kind to each other, families should gather to celebrate and give thanks for their blessings. So, blessing and best wishes for all.

And because I so enjoy tracking Santa’s progress during the evening on Christmas Eve, I thought that those of you with children (or who are young at heart) and who do celebrate Christmas may want to check out NORAD’s Tracks Santa 2008. (Remember to turn on scripts if you have them turned off). Enjoy your evening — I plan watch A Muppet Christmas Carol and other Christmas movies and spot check Santa’s progress.

Merry Christmas to All and to All a good night.

We were walking through Sam’s Club and a movie was playing on the big screen TV in the Blu-Ray section. There seems to be a weird back and forth with a woman on a computer and a young girl and the same man was in the background of both scenes talking to them. Hmmmm, looked interesting. We stood there for a few minutes until someone said “Nim” and we realized it was Nim’s Island. Checking out the movie section, we found that there wasn’t a copy for sale — not actually surprising just before Christmas so we went home and put it on our Netflix list and popped it to the top.

The movie, directed by Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, stars Jodie Foster, Gerard Butler, Abigail Breslin, Michael Carman, Mark Brady, and others. The basic premise is that Nim lives with her marine biologist father, Jack, on an island in the South Pacific. They don’t let anyone know where the island is, even going out in their boat to meet the ships bring supplies. Jack goes out to a small atoll to collect specimens while Nim remains behind to make sure her friend the turtle’s eggs hatch and the babies survive. A huge storm comes up and Jack doesn’t come home as expected in two days. Meanwhile, a cruise ship approaches the island and the adventurer Alex Rover contacts Jack via email to ask about their volcano. Nim and Jack are fans of the Alex Rover novels so this gets Nim excited and she asks Alex for help. But Alex is a character in the novels written by Alexandra Rover who lives in San Francisco and is agoraphobia. Pathos, comedy, adventure, and a darn good movie ensues.

The movie is loosely based on the book, Nim’s Island by by Wendy Orr and illustrated by Kerry Millard. It seems to me, reading the book’s description, that the movie probably adhere more to the spirit rather than the letter of the book — but that’s just a guess since I haven’t had the pleasure of reading the book — yet.

Anyway, what I found interesting is the back and forth between Alex Rover, the fictional male adventure hero and Alex Rover, the writer of the character, and between Nim and Alex Rover the writer who she thought was the adventurer. The movie had so much going on that after watching it three times, I could have watched several more but had to send it back.

The director’s played the imagination of the characters wonderfully. Nim’s friends are a seal, a bearded dragon, a turtle, and a pelican. She has a very active imagination and a self-reliance very advanced for an eleven-year-old. She’s always active and never bored. When the new Alex Rover novel comes, she immediately dives in and we have a wonderful scene of her curled up in bed reading and the room disappears and she’s suddenly on the bed in the middle of the desert and the book’s action is going on all about her. On the other hand, Alex Rover the novelist actively talks to and interacts with her creation Alex Rover the adventurous hero of her books. We see her with all her neuroses and fears and yet when Nim calls for help, Alex goes to her aid.

It could be trite and all heartwarming but there a lot more going on that you’d expect. I’m sure children will enjoy the story at it’s surface level but there’s a lot more going on in the visuals as Alex travels to help Nim and Nim struggles to help herself survive while dreading the loss of her father. Do yourself a favor and if you can suspend belief and just enjoy, watch Nim’s Island. I think you’ll find it well worth the time.

While I’m sure this comes as no big question to professional mathematicians, I’ve never come to an understanding of the nature of infinity. The question that came up this evening while sitting at a traffic light was: if the set of integer numbers is infinite, and the set of real numbers is infinite, and integers are a subset of real numbers, then isn’t one infinity larger than the other? Furthermore, if you subtract the integers from the reals, you still have an infinite set left over. Now take the numbers X/10, where X is an integer. There’s an infinite number of them too. And X/100, X/1000, on and on with increasing powers of 10 in the denominator. Obviously, there’s an infinite number of them as well. Plus X/2, X/20, X/200, X/3, X/30, X/300, etc etc etc. No matter how many infinite sets you take out, there’s still an infinite number left. So doesn’t that make the infinitely large set of real numbers infinitely larger than the infinite set of integers?

So, there’s no solution here, no grand philosophy, no rant. Just the simple acknowledgment that I really don’t understand the concept of infinity, and I wonder if anyone really does?

Today, this article in New Scientist caught my eye. It seems that after studying the phenomena scientists believe that lightning during a snow storm, which is a very rare event (called thundersnows), indicates that a blizzard is coming. The more lightning the stronger the blizzard.

I’m originally from Maine and I think I’ve only seen/heard of thunder and lightning during a snow storm maybe twice in all the time I lived there. Both times the snow was just incredible afterward. Guess I never put the two events together. The articles says that it only gives about a short warning of the blizzard but some warning is better than the current “eye-witness” weather reports.

Predicting weather is getting better all the time but there’s still a long way to go to be totally accurate. The longer the forecast is from the day you read about it the less reliable it is — reading Saturday’s forecast on Monday is unlikely to be more than a general tendency in the weather than an actual prediction.

But to be able to accurately predict a blizzard from the lightening may help those who have to make those decisions to open or close schools, government offices, and business. If it’s snowing fairly heavily and it starts thundering and lightning — it’s probably going to get a lot worse very soon.

I’ve been interested in trying to live off the grid for many, many years.  But as our energy and economic crises get worse and worse it gets to be more important to start the process. I found this interesting article, “How to Unplug From the Grid” on New Scientist. The article seems pretty comprehensive in a general here’s what you have to consider way.

For example:

The good news is that the energy you require is likely to be a fraction of what you presently use, says Tony Brown, head engineer at the UK’s Centre for Alternative Technology near Machynlleth in Powys. The average UK household uses around 4500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity annually, plus some 18,000 kWh of gas for cooking, hot water and domestic heating. In the US the figure varies considerably from region to region. For example, households in New York City use around 4700 kWh a year, whereas those in Dallas use 16,100 kWh: there are a lot of air conditioners in Texas. In chillier regions where people use gas for heating and cooking, on the other hand, they can burn up an extra 28,000 kWh or so per household.

We looked long and hard to find just those numbers when we first were starting to learn about the possibilities. However, just about everyone says the same thing. Before going jumping in with both feet, find out how much you can cut your consumption of power. Some of the best ways to reduce your power usage (from the article):

The biggest energy savings will come from properly insulating your home to minimise heat loss. That done, you’ll need to work out what is eating up the rest of the power you consume. The easiest way to do this is to buy an energy monitor that can provide a live display of your total energy consumption or that of individual appliances (see “What’s guzzling the juice?”). This will help you focus on reducing consumption to the bare minimum, not just by switching to low-energy light bulbs and energy-efficient white goods, but also by turning unused appliances right off rather than leaving them in standby mode. With a bit of effort and investment, you should be able to get by on a few hundred kilowatt-hours of electricity a year.

We’ve started to do some of this. We’ve replaced as many of the light bulbs that we can reach with compact florescents or halogens (lower wattages — same brightness). We bought a door for the basement that was insulated and had insulated glass (double pane with gas between). We hope to take out the current lowest value allowed insulation in our basement and replace with the appropriate level soon — maybe this summer depending on whether we instead opt to replace our single pane windows with double or triple panes to reduce leakage.

We’ve got a long way to go before we’ve reduced what we’re currently using to reasonable levels but we’re working on it. From the article we can see that there’s more to think about and more to do.

What’s your favorite energy reduction strategies? I’m always interested in what others are doing.

And thus we see the real problem with saving energy … money. For years we’ve been able to waste energy left and right because it was cheap. Our entire infrastructure is built on the philosophy that it’s better to the burn extra power than to spend money to improve the system.  Now energy is getting more expensive, but our “cheap” infrastructure can’t just be easily made more efficient.  Then there’s the price of doing what’s right.  Gayle mentioned that we got a new door.  What she didn’t mention is that we asked about the most efficient door.  It would have been $9000 (needless to say we went with a less efficient door and a lower price we could afford).  Nine thousand for a freaking door?  It’s just a bunch of wood and glass with a bit a metal and gas tossed in.  Where does nine thousand dollars come from?  Well it comes from the fact that people that want to save the world tend to be the kind that will spend the cash to bring it about.  The others are cheap and just want a door that closes and locks.  So if people really want to save the planet, you might as well make some extra profit off of their activism.  It’s the American way, after all.  See a need, exploit a need.  Don’t stop squeezing until the pennies stop bleeding.  Okay, maybe that’s a bit pessimistic, but I’m going to be stubborn and stick with it.  So if we want to re-insulate the basement, or change out the windows, we’re going to have to be prepared to spend a good chunk of change to make it happen.  Some, but not all of these changes will pay for themselves over time with reduced energy costs.  Some won’t.  But if you don’t have the money to spare right now, you can’t save money over the long haul, and will end up spending a lot more in the end.  And meanwhile the DVD player keeps blinking 12:00 (not ours but others — but that’s a topic for another rant).

Remember my post awhile ago about the connection between Earth and the Sun that occurs every eight minutes, well looks like more can happen during that connection than scientists first thought. NASA today released an interesting article about a recent discovery by the THEMIS project. It seems that during the connection, while THEMIS was actually watching, the Earth’s magnetic field was breached and solar energy flowed though, charging our magnetosphere. This loads up the Earth’s magnetosphere with charged particles and that can mean more powerful geomagnetic storms — cell phone disruption, prettier Auroras, and other related events.

That they found this as the sun is going into Solar Cycle 24, with more frequent and stronger solar events, may add to the fun here on Earth. [Hyperion: Each Cycle is approximately 11 years long, measuring from Solar Minimum to Solar Minimum, with Solar Maximum hitting at the midway point, or 2012-2013 in this case.]

The really interesting bit is that scientists were convince this just couldn’t happen. But, it did. They have the data and it can’t be denied. It happened. So, now they have to deal with this new information and change their existing theories and check out the ones that they develop to take the place of the old one that was just proven wrong. You just got to love science — it’s so, so practical, the way that new data means throwing out the old way of thinking and start over and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and moves on. Wish that happened more often in the daily life.

I read today a short quote from Oscar Wilde:

, “A school should be the most beautiful place in every town and village – so beautiful that the punishments for undutiful children should be that they should be debarred from going to school the following day.”

I checked to see that he’d said it and found the quote listed in “The Schooldays of Oscar Wilde”
by David Robertson, Portora Archivist. It seems Oscar Wilde’s school didn’t live up to his belief that schools should be beautiful.

I went to school in the usual picture book schoolhouse — looking a bit like you’d expect a church to look actually. It was a small school with grades kindergarten through sixth grade. Then it was on to junior high (the first year in that school) and then high school (the last class to graduate from that building).

I was an okay student. Looking back I believe I could have been a much better student but I was more interested in learning in general than in learning just what was taught. If I found something interesting in an assignment, I was likely to go to the library or to our set of encyclopedias and look up more information and read on that topic until my interest got caught by something else. So, homework got a lick and a promise, but luckily in such small school I was still a A-B student.

Then came college. That’s when lots of things changed. You see I thought that college was the time to explore, learn, expand my horizons, and check out new areas of study. It took nearly flunking out to make me realize that that’s not what colleges are for. College is to polish the edges of what you already know and add depth to the knowledge that you already have. Taking a subject you know nothing about and studying like crazy and ending up knowing a lot but not as much as the students who came into it already knowing the basics and building on that knowledge usually left you at the C or D level, and that’s not how you graduate. So, eventually, I learned that college was not for learning and settled down to polish my edges and got a degree. I even did most of the studying for a MS before I decided I just couldn’t take the politics and rules for rules sake that made little to no sense to me.

However, looking at school now and talking to teens and younger children — schools are prisons now. There’s guards and police officers. In some schools students go through metal scanners similar to the ones in airports. Their belongings can be searched at any time. Some schools have won cases in court and banned students or punished them for things they did outside of school hours and off school grounds. With budget cuts and a worsening economy text books are getting older and older and more out of date. The buildings are decaying. Many classes are held in trailers set up next to the schools.

I honestly can’t think of an environment that is less likely to encourage learning. Then you add in the unfunded No Child Left Behind which translates into you will learn to pass the tests because we can’t do anything else with our budget. The bullying that children suffer from, that teachers can and will do nothing about — because Zero Tolerance means the victim is victimized twice, once by the bully and again by getting the same punishment as the bully if it’s reported. Zero Tolerance means that the letter not the spirit of all the rules is followed and that lowers students respect for and belief in fairness, justice, and authority.

Schools now-a-days seem more about not offending anyone anywhere rather than teaching facts, skills, logic, science, and how-to find out about a topic. To me it is a wonder that anyone learns anything in schools now-a-days and from some of the studies that show up showing that most American’s think the Sun goes around the Earth, that can’t name the states of the US (or even half of them), and can’t find countries on a labeled map. [Hyperion: Or my own pet peeve: That still think global warming and/or evolution are hoaxes.]

Our schools need help and we need to encourage learning. Schools are not supposed to be just places where sports occur at regular intervals with pep rallies. Schools are supposed to be where learning occurs. Where students open their minds to learn about new ideas, new thoughts, and new ways of putting those ideas and thoughts together to form hypotheses, and to gain skills to help them find jobs and work that will be satisfying to them.

Schools should be beautiful places of learning, knowledge, and exciting ideas. Punishment should be denying us the ability to attend schools. Of course, right now your economic ability to pay impacts your ability to attend school more than any other factor. Education should rest on ability to learn not ability to pay.

Just some thoughts…