a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
Today marked the annual, unofficial international pot smoking day. (April 20 is written as 4/20 here in the States. 420 in all its forms, is code for smoking pot).
And where did the use of 420 (say ‘four-twenty’) come from? The term was coined in 1971 by a group of five San Rafael High School friends known as the Waldos, by virtue of their meeting time of 4:20 pm to smoke pot. Not long after that, 420 became a general code word for smoking pot.
I did not buy the big T-Rex I saw at Toys-R-Us (my post a few days ago), but this red one at Walmart was on sale for just $1.97. Besides, the dinosaur – the terrible lizard * – goes nicely with the garage that I added to my Lego house. It’s all just for fun. I will eventually box up these toys and donate all of it to Goodwill.
*Dinosaur comes from ancient Greek δεινός (deinos), meaning ‘terrible, potent or fearfully great’, and σαῦρος (sauros), meaning ‘lizard or reptile’.
The restaurant where my friends and I had our Wednesday beers & a bite, has old car licence plates for the covers of the menus. I was not sure what the rock image on the Wyoming plate was called, and had to look it up.
It’s Devil’s Tower, located in the north-eastern corner of Wyoming. Geologists still debate exactly how the structure was formed, described as a laccolithic butte composed of igneous rock. In plain English: an isolated hill with steep sides and a small, relatively flat top, formed by magma pressed into sedimentary layers and then pushed upwards.
An electronic signboard here on highway I-5 showed displayed a cheeky (rude?) ‘U SUCK’ message for some time today. Was it real? Yes, because Washington State DOT later tweeted ‘This was an inappropriate message and we apologize if anyone was offended. This was due to a training error and clearly a mistake. We are taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again’.
People did not seem too offended. Here are some snarky comments posted on Reddit –
What would my actual house look like in Lego* bricks? I wondered. Well, only one way to find out, I thought: build it – and so I did. I’m pleased with the result. I had to scavenge bricks and roof tiles from my 2004 Lego Designer House kit, destroying it in the process – but that’s OK. The roof was a lot of fun to build.
*Lego is short for leg godt, Danish words that translate to ‘play well’.
It was the last day of spring break for public schools here, and the Westfield Southcenter mall here in the Seattle area was packed with visitors today. It’s a great mall, and I’m sure it will survive the mall armageddon that all the experts predict, with Amazon and all.
I bought some clothes, and while I was there I checked in on the Toys-R-Us store, to see if their Lego blocks were on sale. Not really: the stock was still only marked down 5%. So they are trying hard to get as much as they can from liquidating the inventory.
Finally, at 9 pm Eastern Time on Friday, President Trump announced that targeted strikes will be made against Syria by the United States, joined by Britain and France. Yes, the use of chemical weapons is evil, and a red line. (Dozens of people died in a suburb of Damascus in the latest such attack). But surely we can all agree that war is evil, too. The last comprehensive number of casualties, widely accepted internationally — 470,000 dead — was issued by the Syrian Center for Policy Research in 2016.
The New York Times today: ‘Defense Secretary Jim Mattis took pains on Thursday to walk back President Trump’s threats of an imminent strike on Syria’. And: ‘President Trump’s fusillade of tweets about Syria, Russia and China this week set a new standard for contradictory and inconsistent positions in Mr. Trump’s approach to war, trade and relations with adversaries’.
I spotted a Knightscope security robot today, in a shopping mall parking lot in Bellevue. These are autonomous 6-ft high, 400-lb machines, filled with sensors. The robot scans the environment around it to create 3D images, and to check for unusual situations. I am sure they can already capture car registration numbers. Hmm .. and eventually, recognize the ‘FBI’s Most Wanted’ humans through face recognition?
‘We will deploy AI, we now have 20,000 content reviewers, we now ban fake accounts by the thousand, we support the Honest Ads Act’, testified Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today. (I’m paraphrasing). Well – let’s just say the road to another Facebook-assisted election catastrophe (such as the one we had in 2016), is paved with good intentions.
There were some sharp questions from Senators today, but Zuckerberg did a mea culpa in his opening statement, and could generally stick to his talking points (we messed up, we’re working on it, it’s complicated). He did leave the door open for supporting legislation from Congress, and admitted that the Europeans are doing some things right, when it comes to privacy protections.
Whether Congress can come up with legislation that will make a dent in better protecting data privacy, and rooting out fake news and hate speech – that also remains to be seen.
There President Trump was today, in the Cabinet Room with the press and TV cameras, flanked by his top military brass, and new National Security Advisor John Bolton. The media was invited to the start of discussions about what to do about the atrocities of the chemical attack on civilians in Syria over the weekend.
Instead, Trump launched into a four-minute rant about the news of the day: that his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, had his office, his home, and his Manhattan hotel room raided by the FBI. ‘They broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys .. ‘ (um – the FBI had a search warrant); ‘It’s a disgraceful situation’ (disgraceful, yes); ‘it’s an attack against the country, really’ (you are not a king, President Trump, you are not ‘the country’, and you are not above the law).
On and on it went, as he took swipes at Special Investigator Robert S. Mueller, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and denounced the investigation again as a witch hunt by the Democrats. Is it November yet? – so we can vote all the Republicans out of the House and the Senate, and impeach Trump? For me it does not even matter anymore, what Mueller’s investigation finds.
Spring is in full bloom here in the Northern Hemisphere, and the cherry blossoms are all out – here in the United States, and also in Japan and China.
It rained steadily this morning, but cleared up enough later so that I could make my way down to the Capitol Hill public library. At the corner of Broadway and Thomas, I spotted this guy: big 3-0 balloons in one hand, and a cake box in the other. He was surely on his way to the party for the birthday boy or gal that was turning 30. I remember how I had thought my life was over, when I turned 30. Well, live and learn. I now say: it’s not over until it is over.
I am not deleting my Facebook account, but they have lost my trust. Facebook will do almost anything for money. A sample: they enabled Russians to buy fake news ads (and pay in rubles) for the 2016 US Presidential election scandal, they enabled hate speechers to find target audiences on Facebook; allowed third parties to extract personal data, and then failed to follow up to make sure the data is deleted (the Cambridge Analytica scandal); scanned images and links sent from Messenger.
So now I go in every other day into my Facebook settings, and I am systematically deleting anything that they can use to sell me stuff. No more favorite movies or books, deleting my interests, do not enable just anyone to view my profile, do not enable face recognition in my photos, delete all connections to other apps. Sending money with Facebook? (yes, it can be done). Never.
The Masters started in Augusta, Georgia, today. Gary Player (age 82) and Jack Niklaus (78) were on hand to perform tee shots for the ceremonial opening of the tournament.
Tiger Woods (42) is attempting a comeback, but had a rough start, finishing 7 shots behind Jordan Spieth, the talented 24-yr old Texan.
Check out South African Louis Oosthuizen’s putt on the 16th. He sank a 30-footer by standing with his back to the hole, and judging the sharp break on the putting green perfectly. Big smile and a little shrug of the shoulders afterwards.
It was Wednesday, and so my friends and I went for a beer and a bite at one of our regular watering holes, The Chieftain.
Also: today marked the 50th anniversary of civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
I scan through the Wall Street Journal almost every day, at the public library here in my neighborhood. The weekend edition has puzzles in, and the two puzzles below are from this last weekend. (This is the link to the WSJ puzzle blog).
Update Fri 4/6: Well, the solutions have been published. I got the first one right: 9 links can be drawn. Trying to solve the ‘Seven Points’ problem was a humbling experience, and I got close, but no cigar. I knew the solution had to involve equilateral several connected triangles, but I should have applied more rigor, and maybe used a compass to arrive at the solution (as shown in the figure with the circles, from Math Stack Exchange). So depending on the way one looks at it, the solution is a regular pentagon, with two points carefully added to it, equidistant to three other points on the pentagon .. OR two diamonds pinned at a shared vertice (bottom left on the first diagram), and the other vertices a unit length apart.
It was a brisk 44°F/ 6 °C in the University District this morning at 10 am, where I was this morning. The storm we had on Sunday night was gone. It brought down a little hail at my house, and a thunderbolt so loud, and so close, that it rattled the windows and the glasses up in my kitchen cabinet.
Happy Easter, everyone! Geseënde Paasfees!
March ended with a lovely, sunny spring day (60 °F/ 15 °C) here in the city of Seattle.
