Thursday/ adopt a turtle?

8.00am Friday The little turtle was a project team member’s apartment pet as far as I could find out – possibly found somewhere on the streets here in Dameisha.  It has already been handed over to another caretaker, who is now also leaving the project.    It looks like a water turtle and ideally it should get a nice big fish tank with some decoration to mimic its natural surroundings like those we see at zoos or aquariums !    Maybe the little fella should just be set free if it can take care of itself.       

Update 1.00pm Friday  The little turtle has found a happy home ! .. was adopted by a team member who’s daughter has two others already.   Hopefully he will fit in and it’s not a case of two’s company, three’s a crowd  !

Wednesday/ booking travel on-line in China

The two big web sites for booking airfare inside China are Ctrip.com and eLong.com (pictures below from the eLong site).   eLong.com is affiliated with the USA’s Expedia.com (‘the world’s largest travel company’ it calls itself).    Why didn’t I just use Expedia?   The fare I looked at was $100 cheaper on eLong.com.   With the eLong website I could pay with my US credit card the way we do on websites in the USA, with credit card validation and payment authorization done in the background.    The Ctrip site needed a faxed or e-mailed copy of a form I needed to print and sign, pictures of the front and back of my credit card,  as well my passport picture page.   No! Too much work! and I felt I would put my credit card information at risk for abuse (more so than entering the number on a secure website).      But both sites charge a 3% credit card fee on top of the ticket price. 

And where am I headed?  I have Beijing and the Great Wall of China in my sights for the upcoming Chinese holiday weekend.    The project team is taking a break before the final push to get our system up and operative in May.

Tuesday/ team dinner

We went out to dinner in Shenzhen last night, not too far north of where I stayed this weekend.   The area had plenty of restaurants, many decorated with festive red lanterns.   The first picture is of a traffic jam made by an inept driver maneuvering in the middle of the street OR trying to park right there on the corner!   We were at the Victory Restaurant (the sign is from the restaurant right next to it).    Their signature dish is “The General Crosses the Bridge’ : a whole pork rib served upside down to look like a bridge.   We each had a little piece and it was delicious.    The horse is from the restaurant lobby.

Monday/ at the grocery store

This picture is from the newspaper at the grocery store.   The gas mask makes for an otherworldly, other-creature look out of our collective nightmares, does it not?   And of course a gas mask can just filter out radio-active airborne particles.   It doesn’t really protect against the radiation itself .. or maybe some masks have a lead lining?   (I’m sure the picture is from Japan since we’re not under any threat of any possible radiation from the troubled reactor there).      The second picture is a happier one – of the kid running rice through his hands.   No harm done since the rice will be cooked, and if only it were as easy as that to get rid of contamination!

Sunday/ Shenzhen entertainment

Just a few more pictures I collected for fun in Shenzhen over the weekend.

1.   The brand new Don’t go breaking my heart movie (named after the 1976 Elton John-Kiki Dee duet? not sure)  showing in the Golden Harvest Cinema.    I wasn’t brave enough to go and see it (thought it would be all in Chinese) but I see the trailer at    http://www.mediaasia.com/dontgobreakingmyheart/   does have English sub-titles (and yes – totally what we would call a chick flick in the USA).

2.  Looks like there’s scuba diving at the start and a cocktail party at the end of the blue line of this schematic of the Shenzhen metro lines  !   The Eiffel Tower is a miniture one, from the Window of the World theme park.

3.  Or there’s always Starbucks for coffee, this board from the location at Coco Park shopping mall .    Here is a partial translation  :    星巴克 xīng ​bā​ kè is Starbucks  and 40 周年 zhōu​nián is 40 th anniversary of Starbucks/ 可可  kě​kě is cocoa and 卡布奇诺kǎ​bù​qí​nuò​ is  cappuccino  –  the drink denoted by the characters in the five pink stars/ 巧克力 qiǎo​kè​lì chocolate –  an ingredient in one of the popsicle cakes/  (T)all  (G)rande (V)enti –  Starbucks for large/ even larger/ and enormous.

4.  The model for a cell phone advertiser on a phone booth on the sidewalk is borrowing the iconic pose  from Marilyn Monroe in movie The Seven Year Itch (1955).

Saturday/ a Hong Kong hello

Here’s the view from my hotel room on the 26th floor.  The green hills in the background is the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR), and the waterway in the background is the border between mainland China and Hong Kong SAR.    So here is how you do it to go to Hong Kong ‘on foot’ from Shenzhen.    Take the Shenzhen Metro to the Luohu Port, walk through the China customs, then Hong Kong customs, then hop on to the Hong Kong Metro.   It is totally worth to pay extra to sit in the First Class compartment, because it’s a 40 min ride into the city.   For me, the Tsim Tsa Tsui station in Kowloon is where you want to go if you only have a few hours.

The last Saturday in March is time for Earth Hour, so the picture  shows a little media event getting ready to watch the skyscrapers across Victoria Harbor go dark.      I walked around some more to check out the people and the scenery in Kowloon.    The ‘Power of Imagination’ billboard is advertising Canon digital cameras.  I love it even though no camera will ever take a picture of a guy dressed in Goth with red roses and ravens in the sky, and penguins and mountain goats in the garden of a 17th century palace.    The next picture is for the movie Sucker Punch, an American action-fantasy flick with an ensemble female cast, shot in Los Angeles and Vancouver.    One of the stars is Jamie Chung, a second-generation Korean American from San Francisco.

And then in the Swindon bookstore I just had to snap the cover picture of the children’s book with the Big Bad Wolf about to eat a surprised little Red Riding Hood with her red cheeks.  The wolf put a big smile on my face  : ).

Friday/ escape to Shenzhen

The project team got the weekend off – we needed it!   I could not get a hotel room at a decent rate in Hong Kong because of the Sevens Rugby Tournament there,  so just to get out out my apartment I came to Shenzhen for the weekend.

Pictures . .  Texting ‘We’re stuck in traffic?’ I’m watching you : )  /  Finally arriving at the Hyatt Hotel / Inside the luxury shopping mall by the hotel; no shoppers in sight on a Friday night, though / They are all outside enjoying the spring weather / The Di Wang*building aka Shun Hing Square which I have shown before.. / .. sending out a single green laser beam at times; not sure what the purpose of this is.  In Hong Kong some skyscrapers put on a whole laser show at times/  and as I noted before the ‘King of the Land’ is about to be dethroned by the King Key Financial Plaza building.  That’s the Agricultural Bank of China building in front of it.

*it means King of the Land

Thursday/ Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa

What is that you have there on the desk, Shan Shui? I asked my China colleague today.   Herbal tea? Chinese candy?   No, no.  It’s a very old and famous Chinese cough syrup and available world-wide.  (I haven’t seen it in the USA but if I do, I’ll buy it just to get a hold of the cool packaging it comes in).

‘Nim Jiom’ means ‘in memory of my mother’.   The formula for Pei Pa Koa was originally created by doctor Ip Tin-See, a physician for the Qing Dynasty.  Yang Jin,  a county commander, asked doctor Ip to treat his mother’s persistent cough.    They were so impressed that they created a factory to mass-produce it.

Are you ready for the list of ingredients of Pei Pa Koa syrup?    You have to be ready!  – it is an impressive list !  The blend of herbal ingredients include the fritillary bulb,  loquat leaf,  ladybell root,  Indian bread,  pomelo peel,  Chinese bellflower root,  pinellia rhizome,  Schisandra seed,  Trichosanthes seed, coltsfoot flower, thinleaf milkwort root,  bitter apricot kernel,  fresh ginger,  licorice root and menthol – all  in a syrup-and-honey base.    The base gives the cough syrup a palatable taste.   Maybe I should try a little of it tomorrow? 

P.S.   This is the flag of the Qing dynasty.   I love the dragon on it.

Wednesday/ ein Erdinger Bier, bitte!

‘An Erdinger beer, please’ is what I said tonight in the Dameisha Sheraton hotel.   Three of us had a beer and dinner there.   Below is what landed on the table in front of me.    The server painstakingly poured the beer into a glass and it formed a thick white foamy head.    The beer is a golden cloudy color (the fine unfermented yeast one finds in heffeweizens) and has citrus-sy notes in the taste.   I liked it.    Cheers !

Tuesday/ rooting for Japan

This picture is from the Financial Times that I got on the airplane last Thursday.  David Pilling writes in the accompanying editorial with the heading ‘The Japanese Miracle is Not Over’ that .. the grave faces of public officials cannot have looked much graver in 1945, after the nuclear bombs fell and Emperor Hirohito went on the radio to ask his countrymen to endure the unendurable.  On Wednesday his son, Emperor Akihito, made a rare live television appearance to ask his people to work together to ‘overcome these difficult times’.

The recent events also made me recall a striking TIME magazine cover about Japan from when I was a student, and I just had to look it up.    Found it – the cover of August 1, 1983.    A lot has happened with Japan since that year : greatly inflated real estate and stock prices from 1986 to 1991 followed by a decade-long  recession.    I really hope things are looking up from here for Japan and its people.

From the TIME magazine article:

The Japanese postwar economic miracle is cresting. Japan is a fascinating success, as a business and as a society. It is prosperous and famously homogeneous, safe and civil, bound together by a social contract that is startlingly effective.

Today, Japan is the second most powerful economy in the free world. Its trillion-dollar-a-year industrial machine accounts for 10% of the world’s output. By 1990, the Japanese may achieve a per capita gross national product that surpasses that of the U.S. – Lance Morrow writing for TIME magazine’s Aug 1, 1983 issue

Monday/ a black taxi and the Boomtown Rats

My colleague and I  took a ‘black’ taxi to work yesterday.   Black does not mean the color black, of course : ) .. it means the taxi is not from an official taxi company – it’s a private person moonlighting as a taxi driver.    As we paid him and got out, he signaled ‘call me’ with thumb and index finger to his ear, and gave me his business card.    I recognize the 王 character (for his surname Wáng) on the front of the card but not much else.    The back has English on as well.

Then today on the bus back to Dameisha one of the team members played I Don’t Like Mondays from The Boomtown Rats for us.   The Boomtown Rats are Irish, and even though I have known and liked the song for a long time,  I only found out today (!) on Wikipedia that its dark references are related to shooting incident in a school in California.   It was more or less banned from the airwaves in the USA when it came out but did appear on the Billboard Hot 100 some time later.  The picture is a still of  a young Bob Geldof singing in a music video of the song, with the lyrics below.

 

I Don’t Like Mondays (1979) – The Boomtown Rats

The silicon chip inside her head
Gets switched to overload
And nobody’s gonna go to school today
She’s gonna make them stay at home
And daddy doesn’t understand it
He always said she was good as gold
And he can see no reasons
‘Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need to be show-ow-ow-ow-own?

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoo-oo-woo-woo-woo-oot the whole day down

The Telex machine is kept so clean
And it types to a waiting world
And mother feels so shocked
Father’s world is rocked
And their thoughts turn to their own little girl
Sweet 16 ain’t that peachy keen
Now that ain’t so neat to admit defeat
They can see no reasons
‘Cuz there are no reasons
What reasons do you need?
Oh Oh oh whoa whoa

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoo-oo-oo-woo-woo-oot
The whole day down, down, down, shoot it all down

And all the playing’s stopped in the playground now
She wants to play with the toys a while
And school’s out early and soon we’ll be learning
And the lesson today is how to die
And then the bullhorn crackles
And the captain tackles
(With the problems of the how’s and why’s)
And he can see no reasons
‘Cos there are no reasons
What reason do you need to die, die?
Oh Oh Oh

Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like
I don’t like (Tell me why)
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like
I don’t like (Tell me why)
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoo-oo-oo-woo-woo-woot the whole day down

Sunday/ more Shenzhen buildings

These pictures are from my outing to Shenzhen yesterday.    It was foggy and drizzling, so not the best day to go skyscaper hunting in the city.

From the top down –

Entrance to the Grand Theatre metro station (this is by the mix-C shopping mall) where the cab driver from Dameisha dropped me off  /  ..  and there it is, the King Key Finance Center disappearing into the fog.  Not sure of the name of the building in front of it  /  This is an administrative building of some sort close by / The Shung Hing Square tower (tallest in Shenzhen but about to be overtaken by the King Key Finance Center) / tree with orange spring blossoms at the base of the Shung Hing Square tower/  this is a dorm building for University of Shenzhen students / in the background with the China Southern Power Grid building in the front /  the pink step building might belong to Huatai United Securities (that’s what the billboard on it says)

The next few pictures are from inside the mix-C shopping mall .. a tea seller / a hovercraft demonstrated in Toys-R-Us / a 3D puzzle for the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai / Wonderwoman and Medusa (?) at the MAC cosmetics store .. Pow! take that!

Now outside again .. the World Finance Center is also close by the other two towers the first picture of the base and the next from farther away and finally an Art Deco-y apartment building nearby (with the tree in front of it sprouting little green leaves).

Saturday/ picking our poison

‘Pick your poison’ says The Grim Reaper from Thursday’s Korea Times.   So far we have picked coal and natural gas for generating electricity (diagram from the Financial Time’s Thursday edition).     The print ad is from a copy of the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel.   It looks like a generic ad for the natural gas industry (www.erdgas.info) and and touts a combination of natural gas, solar energy,  heat pumps, fuel cells and what it calls a micro heat-and-power plant for each house that burns natural gas to generate electricity.     Yes, we have plenty of natural gas and it’s a clean-burning fuel but the process of hydraulic fracking to increase the rate of recovery of natural gas from rock and shale formations is said to contaminate ground water and cause air pollution.

I am not going in to work today but I may have to tomorrow.   So I’m off to Shenzhen to go check on the construction of the King Key Finance Center Plaza (and take pictures, of course).

Friday morning/ arrived

The flight path actually took us north of  Sendai over the northern tip of the main island Honshu (north of it is Hokkaido island; the other two big ones are Shikoku and Kyushu).      We arrived on time in Seoul.   That’s a shot of Incheon International airport with Korean Air planes,  late Thu afternoon.      I checked my location on the Google Latitude map on my phone just for fun.     The map detail for North Korea is completely blank – not surprisingly so, I guess.

The flight to Hong Kong was another 3 1/2 hrs.    We arrived on time but there was a delay with the baggage, and then a long line at the Hong Kong exit crossing and a luggage inspection for me at the China Mainland entrance crossing.    So it was 1 am by the time Mr Wu stopped with me at the apartment in Dameisha.

Wednesday/ Seattle > Seoul > HongKong

Yes, I finally made it to the airport for my next trip out to China.    The system we have worked on for 15 months now will go live on May 1.    The Asiana Airlines check-in is in the far south end of the Seatac airport’s upper level, where I found this airplane.

Today I fly to Seoul and then to Hong Kong and we fly over Japan (!), so I even with all the information I have regarding a realistic view of the risks of radiation exposure I am still interested in the exact flight path we will take.   I found Monday’s flight path on flightaware.com.    It does look like an adjustment was made to avoid flying directly over the area where the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant is.   But 1. the radiation levels are reportedly down anyway and 2. the wind direction has been such that it has blown most of the radioactive particles out over the Pacific, anyway.   (There is even a headline question Seattle Times : Is the US West Coast at risk?  Answer : no, no – NO).

Tuesday/ the milliSievert

In none of the reporting on television of the dangers of exposure to radiation from a nuclear power plant have I seen any explanation of how radiation is measured, and what levels of radiation would actually be dangerous.

So first things first.   Radiation dose equivalent exposure is measured in milliSivert (1 mSv = 10−3 Sv) or microSievert (1 μSv = 10−6 Sv).

Here are some examples of typical doses –

  • Dental Radiography : 0.005 mSv
  • Mammogram : 3 mSv
  • Average dose to people living within 16km of Three Mile Island accident : 0.08 mSv; maximum dose: 1 mSv
  • Approximated  radiation exposure at Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power station within 20km: 0.023 mSv or 23μsv; 30km radius: 4μsv (on 03-16-2011 as per NHK World report – may change as this item is active)
  • Immediately after the Chernobyl disaster, some 24,000 people living within 9 miles (15 km) of the plant – residents of nearby Pripyat – received an average dose of 450 mSv before they were evacuated.

In most countries the current maximum permissible dose to radiation workers is 20 mSv per year averaged over five years, with a maximum of 50 mSv in any one year.   A term that is used for nuclear workers is to aim for levels that are ‘As low as is reasonably achievable’, abbreviated as  ALARA.

This is not where the radiation story ends, though.    We are all bombarded with radiation from the environment, from food and from medical procedures (picture from World Nuclear Association’s website).    I get more of it when I fly (of course, airline pilots get even more), and I get radiated when I walk through the full-body scanner at airport security.    (The TSA admitted just today that a recent series of tests of these scanners produced levels 10 times higher than expected .. so they’re following up with more tests).

Monday/ blue skies

I was finally well enough today to venture out of the house, so I took my car for its Washington State-mandated emission test in South Seattle.  It passed again, ’96 model that it is, notwithstanding.     This white, red and blue sign of Franz Family Bakeries is close by on 6th Avenue South.  (They have been around since 1906).    I had the car window open and the wonderful smell of freshly-baked bread was in the air, and so I had to pull over and take a picture.

Sunday/ going for the yottabyte!

Update from World Nuclear News : Operations to relieve pressure in the containment of Fukushima Daiichi 3 have taken place after the failure of a core coolant system. Seawater is being injected to make certain of core cooling.   Malfunctions have hampered efforts but there are strong indications of stability.

I was supposed to travel out to China but postponed my trip to Wednesday.   So I get to catch up reading the magazines that pile up while I’m away.   An fascinating article about cloud computing in Bloomberg Businessweek gives a run-down of where we’re headed with amassing digital information on the planet.   Here it is, with a few lines I added of my own.

1,000 kilobytes (kB) is a megabyte (MB) .. 106 bytes
>   a picture file taken by a cell phone is 2 MB big
1,000 megabytes is a gigabyte (GB) .. 109 bytes
>   a high-end desktop computer has 10 GB of random access memory (RAM)
>   a corporate SAP system may have 200 GB of memory
1,000 gigabytes is a terabyte (TB) .. 1012 bytes
>   a high-end desktop computer has 1 or 2 TB of disk drive space

1,000 terabytes is a petabyte (PB) .. 1015 bytes
>   1 TB equals 13 years of HDTV content
1,000 petabytes is an exabyte (EB) .. 1018 bytes
>   1 EB of mobile traffic data was generated in the USA last year
1,000 exabytes is a zettabyte (ZB) .. 1021 bytes
>   0.8 ZB equals the entire globe’s digital data in 2009, according to IDC
>   35 ZB is the forecast for the volume of all digital data in 2020,
and finally (for now!)
1,000 zettabytes is a yottabyte (YB) ..1024 bytes

Saturday/ the situation at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

Background information from Wikipedia (already updated with the events of yesterday and today) :

The Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant,, often referred to as Fukushima Dai-ichi, is a nuclear power plant located in the town of Okuma in the Futaba District of Fukushima Prefecture, Japan.  The plant consists of six boiling water reactors.   These light water reactors have a combined power of 4.7 GW, making Fukushima I one of the 25 largest nuclear power stations in the world.   Fukushima I was the first nuclear plant to be constructed and run entirely by the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO).

In March 2011, in the immediate wake of the Sendai earthquake and tsunami, the Japanese government declared an “atomic power emergency” and evacuated thousands of residents living close to Fukushima I.    Ryohei Shiomi of Japan’s nuclear safety commission said that officials were concerned about the possibility of a partial meltdown at Unit 1.   The following day, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said that a partial meltdown at Unit 3 is “highly possible.” [end of Wikipedia entry]

The World Nuclear Organization (WNA) publishes updates at http://www.world-nuclear.org/.   As of today 5 of the 6 units have been successfully shut down.   Three were running when the earthquake hit.    The earthquake tripped the start of an automatic shutdown sequence per the design of the reactor, but under these conditions a nuclear plant requires power from another source to run all the pumps, motors, fans and instruments used in the shutdown process.   If there is no off-site electricity from the grid available as was the case here, the plant gets this power from a large diesel generator/(s).    But the tsunami destroyed the diesel generators, leaving the units with no power.    There may have been other procedures, contingencies or redundancies for emergencies, but it appears the scale of the damage caused by the earthquake quake/tsunami combination was not in the plan.   Let it be said that at 8.9 on the scale this was a very big earthquake that would have sorely tested any nuclear power station’s contingencies.

So for the remaining reactor that is still running : it is being cooled by spraying seawater with boron onto it.    This is inside the containment shell.  The water brings the temperature and pressure down and the boron helps to absorb radiation.   The explosion shown by the media was the refueling floor which is still outside the primary and secondary containment area.   But it should be clear by Monday if all of this worked and the core can be stabilized and cooled.   Presumably all of the control rods have been dropped into place (the WMA does not mention that they are not).

The plant personnel are certainly in danger and the evacuation around the reactor is justified.    This emergency at the Fukushima power station has brought comparisons to the 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg PA, which resulted in a partial meltdown of the reactor core – but in the TMI incident the reactor was brought under control quickly (in a day) and no one was injured.   Of course, then there is Chernobyl 1986, the only Level 7 (‘Major Accident’) event on the International Nuclear Event Scale recorded so far, which exposed large numbers of people to substantial amounts of radiation.

This cutaway diagram shows the central reactor vessel and thick concrete containment in a typical boiling water reactor of the same era as Fukushima Daiichi 1

Friday/ the earthquake in Japan

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/03/earthquake-in-japan/100022/

I followed the news reports of the earthquake for the better part of the evening.   The link above shows pictures with shocking detail of the widespread damage.  Some damage was reported in Hawaii and in marinas along the California coast and a 25 year-old daredevil photographer was swept into the sea (he was standing on the beach) and drowned.

There is also concern for damage to Japan’s nuclear reactors.   Japan’s nuclear safety agency said the situation was most dire at Fukushima Daiichi’s Unit 1, where pressure had risen to twice what is consider the normal level.   The International Atomic Energy Agency said in a statement that diesel generators that normally would have kept cooling systems running at Fukushima Daiichi had been disabled by the tsunami’s flooding.