a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Just as efforts to create a blue rose have stymied growers and plant geneticists, so have efforts to create a red iris. The flower has almost no red pigment naturally.
– Barbara Whitaker in a report called ‘The Hunt Continues for the Holy Grail: A Red Iris’ in the NYT, in 2006
Irises come in every color of the rainbow, but not in a true red. I found these ‘red’ ones here in my neighborhood.
It felt like summer today (76 °F/ 24 °C), but we will drop back to cooler weather tomorrow.
Today the President spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, reaffirmed his strong support for Israel’s right to defend itself against rocket attacks from Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza, and condemned these indiscriminate attacks against Israel.
– Statement from the White House @WhiteHouse on Twitter
It just seems to me that this statement hides many, many of the complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. What about the rights of Palestinians, who have been forced with an iron fist, to live like third-rate citizens in the confines of the Gaza strip and territories in the West Bank?
The stills below are from a video posted in the New York Times, of the destruction of the Gaza Tower.
It’s been a dry and mild weather week here in the city (72° F/ 22 °C today).
Four of us played a little doubles tennis at the Jefferson Park courts south of the city.
For me, the updated CDC guidance about not wearing a mask for vaccinated people, feels like a stunning reversal of their guidance issued just two weeks ago.
There are lots of green ‘Fully vaccinated’ maskless smiley faces on this guidance diagram from the Washington Post (compiled from the CDC guidance). I added my own ‘guidance’ in there, for now. I’m just not ready to go everywhere without a mask (esp. indoors), and pretend that the pandemic has ended.
Let’s not forget that the failure of the CDC to contain this pandemic, is at a level I would call ‘Epic’. As the NYT noted in a June 2020 article: ‘The technology was old, the data poor, the bureaucracy slow, the guidance confusing, the administration not in agreement’.
The shrubby peony plant has long been cultivated for its large showy flowers, and it’s easy to see why. This one comes out of my friends’ garden.
HOUSTON — Panicked drivers scrambled to fuel their vehicles across the Southeast on Tuesday, leaving thousands of stations without gasoline as a vital fuel pipeline remained largely shut down after a ransomware attack.
The disruption to the Colonial Pipeline, which stretches 5,500 miles from Texas to New Jersey, also left airlines vulnerable, with several saying they would send jet fuel to the region by air to ensure that service would not be disrupted.
-Clifford Krauss, Niraj Chokshi and David E. Sanger writing in the New York Times about panic buying of gasoline in the Southeast
If you are in the market for a new car, buy one that runs on electricity.
Here are pictures from Sunday, from my walk around South Lake Union.
Wishing all the moms a happy Mother’s Day, belatedly.
It’s been an especially hard year for working moms that had to work from home while taking care of the kids.
”I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”
– Elon Musk during his monologue on Saturday Night Live, tonight
Ever since it was announced (some weeks ago) that billionaire engineer and business magnate Elon Musk would host tonight’s Saturday Night Live episode, the haters chimed in with criticism of him, and the show for inviting him as host.
Well, he was “pretty good at running ‘human’ in emulation mode” (his words). His mom Maye (73) made a cameo appearance during his monologue, and he revealed that he has Asperger’s syndrome (I don’t believe this was public knowledge before today).
He played in almost every skit: a socially awkward guest at a post-quarantine party; a guilty priest in a parody of HBO’s latest crime drama; director of a silly Icelandic TV show; the Mario universe character Wario; a financial adviser that could not explain what (the crypto-currency) Dogecoin is, and a convincing version of himself, as head of SpaceX dealing with an emergency on a Martian colony.
State Route 20, commonly referred to as the North Cascades Highway, opened for traffic on Wednesday.
Huis,
Paleis,
Pondok,
Varkhok.
(‘House, Palace, Cottage, Pigsty’).
– Afrikaans children’s rhyme, used to determine the ‘elegance’ of the house that your family lived in. Point to the top button of your shirt, and say ‘House’; the next button down is ‘Palace’; the next one down is ‘Cottage’, and so on, until you reach the bottom button. (Start again with ‘House’ if your shirt has more than four buttons). The bottom button says what your house is.
Now that the Gateses are divorcing, commentators are wondering what will happen to their sprawling $130 million estate on the shore of Lake Washington. Back in the mid-90’s when construction started, it was dubbed Xanadu 2.0. Xanadu is a reference to the lavish property that belongs to the tycoon character in the 1941 film ‘Citizen Kane’. The 2.0 refers to a next version iteration, such as Windows 3.0.
An intern was allowed to blog about the property in 2007, here. (Quote: ‘Going down Bill’s driveway is like arriving at Jurassic Park’).
Melinda Gates has reportedly bought a property of $1.2 million here in Capitol Hill, just three weeks ago. The reporter called it a ‘cottage’.
It’s in my arm, my second shot of Pfizer-made COVID-19 vaccine.
To the COVID-19 deniers and conspiracy theorists:
YES, COVID-19 is real.
NO, the COVID-19 death rate numbers are not inflated.
NO, there is no microchip in the vaccines.
NO, the vaccine will not change my DNA.
NO, the vaccine is not a plot by Bill Gates, by the US Government, or by any other entity, to take over the world.
The Tuesday & Thursday social tennis sessions for spring / summer at the lower Woodland Park tennis courts, has started.
I was the only one of the 12 in our group playing that wore a mask on the court, and it did not bother me one bit.
It’s impossible to consistently stay 6 feet away from your doubles partner, and we brush by the others as we change sides, or courts. Why be careless, now that I am so close to get my second shot of the vaccine?
Washington State, as most other states, allow vehicle owners to personalize their license plates — for an extra license renewal fee, of course. I think it’s $80 per year.
I’ve been there, and had done that, with my two Toyota Camrys: just the letters for my name or a slight variation of that (not very imaginative, but definitely personalized).
The last number of years I had just gone with the randomly assigned plate number issued to me by the licensing agent for Washington State DOT.
Now with my super high-tech and exciting electric car on the way, I’m tempted to go for it again.
Here’s a rundown of some possibilities.
The plates in the leftmost column are all taken, per the licensing website, so those are not available! Those in the 2nd and 3rd columns still are.
BLIKSEM Let me help with the decoding here. BLIKSEM (say ‘blɪksəm’) is the evergreen favorite of personalized car plates for South Africans. It’s Afrikaans for ‘lightning’. It is also an expression of surprise, or shock, or disgust, and slang for ‘rogue’ or ‘devilish-but-maybe-still-likeable person’, as in Man! Did you do that? You are a BLIKSEM! BLITS (say ‘blitz’) means ‘lightning’ or ‘very fast thing’.
WATTSUP, NOWWATT WATT is the SI unit of power/ electric power. I thought of AMPERE3 and VOLT3 as well. VOLT is the name of Chevrolet’s 2011–2019 electric car, and not ideal to use, though.
3SACHRM Short for ‘Three’s a charm’ (third time is a charm). Three for Model 3, with the SA in there for South Africa, let’s say. And —very obscure, I will admit — a charm quark is a sub-atomic particle, found in protons and neutrons (but not in electrons).
VUVUZLA Vuvuzela, a long horn blown by fans at soccer matches in South Africa. Made famous during the World Cup of 2010 in South Africa.
10SNE1 Tennis anyone?
JENESQA Je ne sais quoi, the French expression for ‘that certain something’ (such as an appealing quality), that cannot be adequately described or expressed with any other words. Unfortunately, some people might think there is also a QANon conspiracy theory in there.
heath
/hēTH/
noun
BRITISH
an area of open uncultivated land, especially in Britain, with characteristic vegetation of heather, gorse, and coarse grasses.
It’s the month of May, so the rhododendron flowers are blooming here on Capitol Hill. These plants belong to Ericaceae, a family of flowering plants, commonly known as the heath or heather family.
I found a great deal on a rental car for four weeks, and went down to Hertz on 8th Ave to go pick it up. I hope to get my new car early in June. These pictures are from my walk down to Hertz on Friday.
Here’s the 240-volt adapter for charging my Tesla’s car battery. (I had to buy it separately; it does not come with the car. Now all I need is the actual car with its battery, right?).
I will need a new electrical outlet, connected to a 240 V circuit, in my garage, similar to the one that I have in my basement for the clothes dryer. The standard 120 V outlet will actually do the job, charging the car. It will just charge a lot slower, up to 8 miles (of battery range) per hour vs. about 30 miles per hour for the 240 V outlet.
Think of electricity current (electrons) as water in a pipe, and voltage as the pressure that is applied to push the water through the pipeline. High voltage pushes more electric charge per second through the charging cable, and gets the battery charged quicker.
Just for fun, here’s a table with examples of electricity flow, current and voltage.
One ampere of current is one coulomb of charge moving past a given point per second. One coulomb is exactly 1/(1.602176634×10−19) elementary* charges.
*the charge on an electron
| Electricity Flow | Current | Voltage |
|---|---|---|
| Current across human cell membrane | a few µA | 70 mV |
| iPhone consuming battery power | 0.1- 0.5 A | 3.7 V |
| LED light bulb (12W) | 0.1 A | 120 V |
| Incandescent light bulb (60W) | 0.5 A | 120 V |
| Electric eel, delivering a shock | 1 A | 600 V |
| Household clothes dryer | 11 A | 240 V |
| Tesla car battery, charging | 12- 48 A | 240 V |
| Long-distance power transmission line | 700 A | 350 kV |
| Lightning bolt (run for cover) | 30 kA | 300 MV |
I have been counting the days after Wednesday, April 14 when I got my first Covid-19 vaccine shot.
The graph below has been doing the rounds on Twitter, and has been featured in articles about the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
It was compiled in 2020 by Pfizer with data from the vaccine trials.
New coronavirus cases quickly tapered off in the vaccinated group of volunteers about 10 days after the first dose*. In the placebo group, cases kept steadily increasing.
The second dose boosts and extends the protection (for at least 6 months, possibly for much longer).
*If someone in the vaccinated group did get infected, the symptoms were milder, and there were no fatalities, either.
Tomorrow marks President Joe Biden’s first 100 days in office.
Tonight, he addressed a joint session of Congress, with two women on the dais behind him for the first time in the country’s history (Madam VP Kamala Harris and Madam Speaker Nancy Pelosi).
The president noted that 220 million vaccine shots had been given since he had taken office, and talked about his $2 trillion infrastructure plan.
Biden’s plans are big and bold. All told, there is a total of $6 trillion in the spending plans he has rolled out.
He says he will move ahead with these plans, even if he does not receive a single Republican vote of support in Congress:
The American Rescue Plan (the coronavirus relief bill), passed by Congress in March, $1.9 trillion.
The American Jobs Plan (infrastructure plan), unveiled Mar. 31, $2.3 trillion (paid for in part by raising the corporate tax rate).
The American Families Plan, unveiled this week, $1.8 trillion (paid for by increases in tax collection and high-earner income & capital gains taxes).
Here’s the QFC grocery store on 15th Ave, that had closed its doors for the last time on Saturday.
The store’s owners, the Kroger Co. based in Cincinnati, Ohio, says it was not profitable enough. The $4-per-hour hazard pay to grocery workers, mandated by the City of Seattle, ‘had forced their hand to close it’.
