What is wrong with surveys

I wrote this sketch to illustrate what is wrong with telephone surveys, like this latest one that says 1/4 of Americans think the sun goes around the earth.

I wonder what percentage of people, interrupted in their daily activities by unwelcome phone calls, feel compelled to give serious, correct answers to questions.

ⓒ ANNE BARSCHALL 2014

Musings on New Year's Eve and Fireworks

I spent New Year’s Eve online on twitter – under my pseudonymous account –  tweeting back and forth with Josh Groban and his fans. He was home alone.  I was home alone.  He said he had pink eye, though he may have been joking about that.  I am recovering from chemo.

I had the opportunity to go up to powellhouse.org, but decided I was just too tired.  My ex and my sons went.  They all came back with colds.  I’m glad I didn’t go, as I’m immune compromised and shouldn’t be in close quarters with people who are sick.  Since bathrooms are shared there, bugs go around pretty fast.

I had fun tweeting back and forth with people.  It was quiet.  There was no issue about being on the roads with drunk drivers. 

Later I watched the YouTube videos of fireworks in London, Dubai, Singapore and Taiwan, in that order.

Obviously, Dubai won – hands down, no contest.  Those fireworks were extraordinary – and kind of scary.  It’s amazing if no one was injured.

I am thinking, tho, I’m glad I saw it on YouTube and not in person.  It would have been noisy.  It would have been smoky. 

I’m thinking back on fireworks displays I saw as a kid.  I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.  This was the fourth of July. 

We went out to a local park where the city put off the legal fireworks.  We put on lots of OFF!, because Madison is very buggy in the summer.  We sat on a blanket on the lawn.  The people shooting off fireworks were situated at a safe distance from us.

They shot off one firecracker at a time into the sky.  As each one went off, the whole crowd would say “oooooo” softly, in awe, because they were very beautiful. 

There was some time between each one, maybe a minute.  We could watch them go up into the sky, while we were waiting.  They made a sort of whistling sound and a slight sparking at the back of the unit as it rose, so you could track it, so it wasn’t dull waiting. 

There were a few that were merely loud, like the bang of a cannon ball, and made a bright light.  There were a few displays on the ground, on frames, that they lit up and they made sparkling pictures. 

At the end they had a finale, where they shot off maybe twenty or thirty at the same time.

I think it took about twenty minutes.  It started at 9pm.  We were home by 10.  We had some handheld sparklers that we could use at home & draw pictures with in the air.  I liked those, though now I think they’re considered too dangerous for kids.  We didn’t get hurt, fortunately.  Also, we had some caps that we could pound with hammers on the sidewalks during the day before.  Those made a banging noise.

We thought it was cool.  We had no clue what might be in the future for fireworks.  The idea of what just went on in Dubai couldn’t even have occurred to us.

When my mom was a kid, they just had a small cannon and a few small fireworks at home, which was even smaller than what I had.

When I think about it, I wonder if we’ve gained anything here. 

Quantum mechanical entanglement and ESP

I would like to start out by describing two incidents.

The first incident happened to my grandfather and was passed down to me as oral history, by my mother.

My grandfather was a hunter.  He went on a safari in Africa.  His guide on the Safari was a man from England.  

About 20 years after the safari, my grandfather suddenly wondered what had happened to his former guide, so he sent off a letter to England, from New York.

He got back a letter from the guide's widow saying that the guide had been mauled and killed by a lion on the day that my grandfather wrote the letter.

The second incident happened to me. 

I was having natural childbirth at home, here in Tarrytown, NY.   

There is a part of labor called "transition."  This is when the contractions transition from dilating the cervix to pushing the baby out.  Transition is commonly thought of as the most painful part of labor.  I'm not sure, in retrospect, whether it was really the most painful or whether, rather, it was the most emotional, possibly due to massive internal hormonal changes in changing from one type of contraction to the other.  

In any case, when I went into transition, which is the time when women in labor get most emotional, called out "Mommy."

Now, we had not told my mother that I was in labor.  I wasn't getting along with her that well at that point.  It was 10 days before my due date.  She was in Wisconsin, while I was in New York -- about a thousand miles away.  

The phone rang almost immediately after I called out "Mommy."

The woman who was assisting wanted to know if I wanted to talk to her.  I did not.  I had only called out her name reflexively.  

Still, it was fairly amazing that she called just at that moment when I called.  It is said that mothers always know when their daughters are in labor.  

I am thinking that these incidents can be explained by quantum mechanical entanglement.  

If two people have entangled particles -- and those particles are separating from each other in some traumatic way -- then there may be some kind of transmitted reaction that can be sensed in some way by the person whose particles are not separating.

I suppose others may have written about this, and I haven't researched it, but I just wanted to memorialize my experience.

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Now also, when my father had cancer, I had phantom sensations which seemed like they might be related to his tumors.  It was easy to dismiss this as imagination, but then I wonder really if it was imagination or whether, again, it might have been attributable to quantum mechanical entanglement of some kind.

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Addendum 9/10/15

Also Lisa Marie Presley reported crying all day the day Michael Jackson died, before she learned that he had died.

Here's a link about Quantum entanglement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement  Quantum entanglement can occur due merely to physical proximity of particles.

I do not believe that what happened to Lisa Marie was a coincidence. When we are in close proximity, our subatomic particles become quantum mechanically entangled. Entangled particles are able to communicate with each other somehow, even when separated. It seems to me that if something happens to the body in which the entangled particles reside then your particles could possibly sense it.

MIT article about entanglement

FDA Bans Trans Fats

Oh, great!  The FDA has decided that trans fats are too dangerous to put in food.

When I was a kid, everyone thought that butter was unhealthy.  Even though I grew up in Wisconsin, the dairy state, my parents bought into this fad.  

At first, Wisconsin outlawed the use of food coloring in margarine, because they felt that this food coloring was misleading in making margarine look like butter.  This meant that Wisconsin margarine was white.  I guess they couldn't outlaw margarine entirely, since corn, which is used to make margarine, is also grown in Wisconsin.

Later, they sold margarine in plastic bags with a food coloring tablet enclosed in the bag.  We could crush the food coloring into the margarine and then manipulate the bag until the coloring was distributed throughout the margarine, so it would look yellow.

My father used to bring back margarine from Illinois, when he went there, because you could get yellow margarine from Illinois.

More recently I've seen more and more researchers saying that there is no evidence that eating cholesterol causes cholesterol in the blood stream.  I saw a report of one piece of research finding in a small group of older women with diabetes that eating cholesterol actually lowered their blood stream cholesterol.  Moreover there have been articles stating that cholesterol may have a protective effect against cancer.  I've also seen anecdotal reports that cholesterol is good for the brain, especially for people with autism spectrum disorders, which run in my family.

My parents were so well-meaning.  Yet, somehow, it never occurred to them that the margarine might be more dangerous than the butter, or even that the margarine might be healthier without the food coloring. 

In retrospect, that should have been obvious.  Butter has been around for thousands of years.  Margarine was a new experiment.  Yet doctors, without any research backing them up whatsoever, were recommending this dangerous new substance and saying that it was safer than the older, tried and true substance.

Given that I'm having a health issue right now, I start to wonder what consequences that medical advice is having for me.

error with blogger.com

I was looking at my posts. Then I tried to click on overview and got this error message

I took this screen shot, but then tried to give feedback.  In order to give feedback, I had to clear this error message.  Then the website took a snapshot of my screen while I was giving feedback, but by that time the error message was gone.

Frustrating.

Catch 22

one more thing that broke

I like to use a reel mower.  There are several reasons for this:

1. exercise;
2. seems better for the environment
3. quieter (my dad had hearing loss from loud appliances: mower, snowblower, shaver)

My previous reel mower experienced a bent & nearly broken handle, courtesy of my son, who does not know his own strength and who just keeps pushing, no matter what happens.

Since the last reel mower did not last long, I decided to go on amazon.com to look  for something different.  I chose the Fiskars 6201 18-Inch Staysharp Max Push Reel Lawn Mower, because it looked sturdier than the one i had been using.

Unfortunately, it turned out not to be so much sturdier.  Here is a photo of the front wheel with a huge chip out of it.

Just another broken thing driving me nuts.

You'll notice this is my third blog in a row about things that have broken.

washing machine failure

This is a picture of the motor control unit of my washing machine showing burn marks

This is a closeup of a part with the top exploded off

This is a copy of the case for my motor control unit showing burn marks.

This washing machine is a Whirlpool model wfw9150ww00.  It is two years old and therefore out of warranty.

This part cost approximately $220 with the tax.  With the service added, the repair was about twice the cost of a new washer.

The repair person said that this type of damage could be caused by a voltage surge.  

I got a surge protector for my washing machine.  Before that I had never realized that washing machines needed surge protectors.

My previous washing machine lasted over 20 years, with only one or two repairs, none of which was this expensive.

I believe that something needs to be done about protecting consumers from this type of crap.  Obviously a one year warranty with planned obsolescence is completely inadequate.  Moreover, Con Ed should be responsible if their voltage surge caused this problem, yet they claim no responsibility for damage to appliances.

The quality of products being distributed in this country is clearly in a downward trend. I know I am not unique in being victimized by shoddy construction and poor customer service.

The government is asleep at the switch here, while everyone is getting ripped off.