June 3, 2013

Tree

Welcome June

"In these divine pleasures permitted to me of walks in the June night under moon and stars, I can put my life as a fact before me and stand aloof from its honor and shame."
-  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals 

“There are moments, above all on June evenings, when the lakes that hold our moons are sucked into the earth, and nothing is left but wine and the touch of a hand.”
-  Charles Morgan

Fatalism

Well it's hard to be fatalistic when under the influence of dandelion beer. 

But, when  15 year old girl in my state goes to meet someone she knew from facebook and ends up in the medical examiner's office it becomes every parent's nightmare.

Try to tell your 15 year old, remind them, that anyone can make a facebook profile and just because  5 or 10 of their friends are also friends of that person does not make that person ok....and deal with that attitude.

Inform and trust, and a lot of prayer. 

I guess it might help or may hinder that I walked off on my own at 16, wholeheartedly believeing that I would not live to see 21 because I just had too much trust in strangers.

Now that I am much older I ride the tin rocking horse between trust and paranoia.

Paranoia because I have known many souls that are just in it for their own good no matter what the cost, and others that would give you the shirt off their backs.

I still try and maintain that truth.  I hand out bucks to the homeless and hungry signwielders at the crossroads, wishing I had an extra room and more money.

I offered the kid I worked with today the clean socks off my feet since his were soaked through from riding a bicycle in the pouring rain to his job.  I had a pair from the day before in my car I could put on my own...and it so happened I had on guy socks since I was in a rush and grabbed the first mated pair I could locate in the clean laundry- a relatively new pair of the Firebird.

When he declined I felt sort of like an ass, of course who wants to wear someone else's socks? But having had wet feet in the past, I thought it was worth the offer.

Divide and conquer, that is where society is at in these times.

What of the parents trying to find their kids in the aftermath of the vicious tornadoes that devasted the midwest this week? Met with roadblocks, mothers having to walk for three hours to meet their sons and walk three hours back to their cars.

Remninscent of Katrina, where folks were forced to leave their beloved pets at the evacuation buses, or at home and not allowed to return.

We have a plan here, the Firebird being in high school hopefully won't be locked down, and is under orders to start walking, and either we will meet in the middle and go to claim the Willow, or he will continue home and I will claim the Willow on my own. 

I am hoping we won't ever have to be evacuated from here, or I envision us going down the road with a herd of goats and poor aging peko keeping the pack of cats and chickens and geese in order... we better be dragging a travois because I don't think the evac centers would let us in .

Since I see most of the blue coastal evac signs point in this direction I suppose that in case of real emergency most of our gang will be appropriated to feeding the masses... along with whatever crops I produce in the meantime.

but I hope I can be the one handing out the soup, and glad to be of service.

First Petunias and now the Pope

Go San Lorenzo!

Facebook profiling

My last post I discussed various privacy issues as they relate to utility companies.

Most readers will be aware of the privacy drawbacks of Facebook. People have heard the stories of how people have lost their jobs because their boss read something they didn't care for on their Facebook page. Or perhaps the reader has heard of people who were asked to hand over the passwords to their Facebook accounts to prospective employers.

Today the news was out that it is not just people the Facebook user chooses to allow to view their personal information who can draw conclusions about FB users.

A Facebook app, mypersonality, tracks a person's "Likes" and draw conclusions based on that data.

A study published Monday by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed the likes of 58,000 facebook users and was able to tell a person's sexual orientation, race and political affiliation correctly in greater than 85% of study participants. 

Researchers also attempted to determine user's religion, drug and alcohol use and IQ.



 
The public is sold on the idea of giving up their personal data with the promise that the experience will be greatly enhanced by providing advertising that might appeal to the user. 

 
The implications of such profiling are a bit frightening. Black or white, gay or straight, democrat or republican, christian or muslim? One of which eight different personality types? Drinker, medicinal marijuana user or supporter? Add that to the information on your browsing history(if you stay logged in to Facebook while browsing the net, they know where you go) and think back to the McCarthy era. 



Perhaps certain people don't agree with various policies? Perhaps they have the profile of an activist?

What about the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2?

Opponents of any criticism are hushed with the words, "If you're not up to anything, you shouldn't be worried."

Are you worried yet?

The high cost of privacy

I was on the telephone this afternoon with a very nice spokesperson from CMP, or Central Maine power.  No need for "ah-hah's" despite the homey specific name, the whole state of Maine's electric is provided by either CMP or Bangor Hydro (miniscule in comparison customer-wise, to CMP)

Actually, CMP's parent company is out of Spain.

Anyhow, CMP received lots and lots of taxpayer dollars to upgrade "The Grid" a year or so ago.  Then they showed up at everyone's doorstep with a "digital meter" to replace the old analog ones, with the disk that spins around and sets of dials from 1-9 that a meter reader had to come and manually read your KW usage every month.

A truck pulled into my driveway, and I greeted the visitor in the usual(unusual) fashion of dashing out in whatever grundge I was currently wearing and probably barefoot, to be greeted with,

:"I am here to install your digital meter."

uh, no you're not

"I don't want one,"  I said.

"Well, fine, but you have to sign this form blah blah blah grrr grrrr grrr!"



The blah blah blah part was explaining to me that, if I refused, I would be charged a non-standard meter fee of $12 per month.



Fine, so be it.



The grr-grr grr was because I could not be bought, at least not cheaply.



My alert antennae went to high.



What is in it for CMP that I have to pay $12?



I wasn't the only one miffed off. Lawsuits ensued. A miniscule of hope that CMP would have to refund those charges that were steadily racking up.



The lawsuits focused on Health risks. Electro-magnetic exposure from digital meters.



In the meantime, bee-keepers started experiencing colony collapse disorder. The government had already switched all the TV airwaves to digital as well.  Were these signals bad for health?

Hey, I have a cell phone and smoke and had radioactive iodine treatment and grew up a sun worshipper. Do my readers truly believe I was worried about a measley little digital meter for health reasons? :P

Follow the moneybaby.

I have to admit to a certain amount of naivety, or maybe it is denial of my borderline paranoid personality, so I figured my $12 a month was paying the meter reader. Who did a really crappy job compared to my old meter reader, who used to hop determinedly out of the truck and march up to the meter for the monthly reading, no matter if a pack of bullmastiffs or protective geese were determined to prevent it. (Ok, I used to joke that the bullmastiffs were harmless unless you were worried about getting licked to death, lol, but they looked intimidating)

The current one is a wuss and afraid of earthworms in the lawn.  I swear she was demoted from the office.

Her prissiness aggravated me so much one day, I said, "heh, gotta earn your 12 bucks when you come here!"

I felt sort of proud of my stance, paying my 12 to keep someone in a job.  Because the digital meters transmit, they don't have to come and read them.

Well, I had a dispute this month over an estimation on my bill. They estimated me around Feb 14, and when I read my (analog) meter this afternoon, two weeks later, I had yet to reach where they said I was Feb 14.



This little trick is two fold, first, I would have to anty up now for electricity I haven't used yet. Second, when the next actual reading comes in, I could possible be below the minimum 100KW, which is  charged much higher than over 100KW. This happened to me one year, and I pursued it much to the chagrin of the guy on the other end who finally credited me the 75 cents difference. I was making a POINT.

As I was attempting to do today, but the point was rather mute since I have yet to receive the bill following the estimation.  She argued and argued there was no way I would use less than 100 KW in the next two weeks, but it will be very close and we shall see. :D *runs around shutting off all the lights* j/kLOL

Somehow we got on the subject of digital meters. Oh year I was bitching about my bill. $180 dollars a year not to have a digital meter.  My grrrr now. 

"Is it for health reasons?" she asked.

"Because, as a consumer, outside work, I did my own research and they put out not more than a baby monitor, and it's outside your house so I decided that was fine!" she said.

"Actually, I did it for privacy reasons," I told her.



(no practiced response so this was greeted with silence)



"Look," I said," the way the meter is set up, it could determine what time I get up by when the coffee pot goes on, it could determine what time I go to bed at night, by when the TV goes off. This is set up to measure time of use, and it is no big stretch to say it can also identify what type of appliance you use and what time it occurs. "

"oh no, they can't do THAT." she replied.

"The old analog time-of-use meters were set up to monitor three time brackets and how much you used during that set of time, not specific to devices."

Then she realized what a can of worms that opened,(because we were not talking about privacy issues with the old analog meters) and started with, "and I can go out and look at my digital meter and see when there is high usage and then determine what is going on."

Duh, I didn't bother to point out to her that with the old meters you could see how fast the wheel was moving and wonder what the heck was drawing all that power. Actually, the wheel is a more visual tool.



"No," I said," well that is good that we all cut our usage and pollute less (more squirming on the other end, poor girl, I hope she enjoys that money they pay her for this)
(this is a real benefit to the consumers, are they providing a kitchen top reader, no, you still have to tramp out through the snow drifts to check your own usage, but the meter reader can now do it from the road)

Well, I started to feel this personal connection forming, and that is probably what she is paid to do, but I explained to her that it was not just her company, but someone could hack into their database and gain access to that info, and that caused a bit more squirming.


Then I told her for example that I pay $5 a month to my phone company for an unlisted number. Now why, if they don't have to print it in a book, or give it out over the phone, do I have to pay money? they should be saving money.  But you see, follow the money.  The phone company makes money on your phone number., Yes, you can register with a do not call list for telemarketers, but the phone company makes a heck of a lot of money off phone books, selling advertising in the yellow pages.  And if no one put their number in there, there would be no phone book to sell advertising.

So what is CMP doing that it wants $12 not to have access to your digitalized electrical information?

Silence.

By the way, I got transferred to an even nicer lady about my poor telephone connection not being caused by the neighbors digital meter because it is an old fashioned hard-wired landline, no duh, the lines this way are so bad and of course those wiretaps  create havoc with the sound quality.

*here I lost a long part of my post about the mail service, how all my packages from UPs were arriving tampered with, how I believed it was the driver, but then regular mail started arriving tampered with as well.

and made a point about how the USPS is trying to do away with delivering letters, how much easier it is to snoop through emails, and presto, whole post gone.  But, I had copied and saved to the above point, just don't feel like reinventing the rest I lost.

damn, am I going to let "them" win?

Nope, because the whole prompting of this post was the coincidence in an AP story tonight...out of Barcelona, Spain, a tech show, that was promoting M2M (machine to machine technology) and how great it would be for consumers if their refridge could tell their phone the door was left open, or is you could turn your coffepot on with a text...
damn, wasn 't I jsut pointing out to the CMP spokewoman that those digital meters could tell what time I arose in the morning by the time my coffeepot came on, and she was denying the ability to do so???


keep profiling me baby, I am harmless, but it's none of your damn business, especially if you're going to make money off my personal information.

Comets, Meteors, and Asteroids, oh my!

As usual, I have been busy. Everyday I try and fit in some time for research, happily wandering the big web learning about things.

For quite a few months, I have been following spaceweather@  spaceweather.com  Mostly monitoring solar activity and enjoying the nice photos provided by spacelovers everywhere.

I haven't bothered to blog about it, because there are a lot of great astronomy sites out there, and much better written, as well.

I'll give you a little summary.

The sun has been fairly active, lots of sunspots, coronal holes, small and large flares, and even a few CME's.  The sun is at a maximum in the current solar cycle.

We have several comets buzzing around out there, three of them will  be visible to the naked eye.

First, comet PanStarrs, C/2011L4, will be brightest on March 10th.  Look for it March 9-11 just above and to the left of the setting sun.  Estimated orbital period of 110,000 years, so this one has been gone awhile.

Second, Comet Lemmon, C/2012F6, with an elliptal orbital period of 11,000 years, shouild reach naked eye visibility in late March.  Lemmon is already putting on a nice show in the southern hemisphere with binoculars, with a green coma.  Yes, A green Lemmon. Cynagen gas &diatomic carbon burn green in the vaccuum of space.

Lastly, Comet Ison, C/2012S1.  On October 1 it will be closest to Mars. On November 28th it will be closest to the sun. On December 26 2013 it will be closest to Earth.  on Jan14-15 2014, Earth will pass through the orbit of comet ISON.  Comet ISON's orbit indicates that it is a first time visitor from the Oort cloud, a region beyond the known planets in our solar system.  Every so often something stirs up the Oort cloud and here come the comets. Some astronomers think that ISON may grow to be brighter than a full moon. Other astronomers remember comets that fizzled out on their way around the sun. Either way, this will be our only chance to see ISON, as it's orbit suggests it won't be coming back this way again.

In the meantime, we can keep busy watching the skies and news for meteors.  One estimated to be the size of a bus exploded over Russia. the shockwave destroyed  thousands of panes of glass.  Hint: if you see a flash, don't run to the window, run for cover.  Or take the advice of someone else, and position yourself at the window but behind something, put your hands over your ears and keep your mouth open.  That should alleviate the pressure when the shock wave hits.

There are lots of smaller meteors as well, some just flashes of light in our peripheral vision as we pick out constellations in the night sky, others that make it to Earth are kept a little quiet, any damage is blamed on something else.  After all, we can't have the public in a panic or a rush of treasure hunters inundating the areas in question, no?  Especially when some meteors are worth much more than gold. I am not sure how they rate as so rare, considering our own planet is also, technically, just a big space rock too.

Happy Valentine's Day

Tree

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost

February

Tree