a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
It’s the 29th of Feb! .. a day that comes by only once in four years, but then again, it’s a completely arbitrary thing and a human invention, the leap year with its leap day. Check out Amanda Foreman’s write-up in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal about the calendars and how Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar became the one that we have measured the days of the year by since 1582.
I picked up my rental car again today and drove up on 
Highway 101 from the airport through the city and onto Broadway. Man! There are plenty of one-way streets, stop signs, bus only and bike only lanes, and pedestrians to watch out for. Once I reached Broadway, I told myself : park the car now; you cannot ogle at everything and drive at the same time. I was shocked to actually find a parking space, but I did, and I could walk around a bit to explore Broadway and a few blocks close by.
Here are some pictures of Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. I bought a Clipper card and learned how to use the ‘Muni’ transit system : a network of buses and historic streetcars, the Muni Metro light rail, and the famous San Francisco cable cars.
We completed our work session late afternoon, and we have another one early Monday morning, so it was hardly worth for me to fly back home for a very short weekend. And so I’m staying over in the City. I took the rental car back to Hertz, and I took the train into the city. (I will pick up the rental car again on Sunday).
I am staying in a Marriott close to Union Square. There was a little drizzly rain in the air as I went out for a walk, but barely enough to make the streets and pavements wet.
It’s spring here in California, that’s for sure! Our project is in its final three weeks, and the remaining project team members have given up their office space in Walnut Creek and moved to San Ramon. It is an upgrade of sorts : the old building in Walnut Creek was built in the 1970s with outdated cubicles and all. This building is more or less state-of-the-art; not Google or Facebook league, but still new with a ‘town square’ cafeteria space, ‘huddle rooms’ for quick meetings, and meeting rooms with built-in projectors and electrical outlets right there on the desktop (and not on the floor in a corner somehere).
I took BART out to San Francisco to spend the day at my firm’s office in the Embarcadero. The Ferry Terminal is close by, and it was warm enough to enjoy the cool air and sunshine by the waterside during lunch.
Turn down the thermostat to 65 °F (18.3 °C) to fall asleep easier, and sleep better, says the science about sleep. The body’s core temperature actually needs to drop by 2 or 3 °F to initiate sleep. And what I suspect many of us in warmer climates know : the body tries to lose heat through the hand and feet, so stick one or two out from under the blanket if the room temperature is a little too high.
I ignored Saturday’s baffling and crazy mass shooting in Kalamazoo, Michigan* and ordered an Uber driver nonetheless, to get me to the airport today. The driver was fine, but I really should take the train next time. We got completely stuck in traffic for 15 minutes even before we got to Interstate 5.
*Uber is a popular online taxi dispatch company (rides are ordered with a smart-phone app). Uber does vet its drivers and does background checks on them. During Saturday night in Kalamazoo, a forty-something Uber driver – a dad with two kids, no criminal record – shot eight people in cold blood at three locations, for no apparent reason whatsoever. Six people dead. He was found and stopped after seven hours. He really had no explanation to offer for his actions at his arraignment today.
The Jeb Bush for the 2016 Republican nominee for President campaign is over : a spectacular failure of the very high expectations of all his donors that had amassed a $103 million campaign war chest just a year ago. Earnest, thoughtful and modest, Jeb might well have been the best of the Bush presidents. If only he hadn’t been the third one, writes Matt Latimer on Politico.com, here.
Hey, I don’t agree with the man’s politics and policies, but now we are left with candidates such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. As political observer Ezra Klein says here, we need to stop laughing at Trump (and take him seriously); he’s downright dangerous. Or : never mind Trump. Watch out for Ted Cruz, and do not vote for him. See what Robert Reich, Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, says about him, here.
On Saturday I took the street car down to Seattle’s Japan Town (it really occupies just a few city blocks, adjacent to the much larger Chinatown). I ended up buying this 2008 poster called ‘Nihontown’. It is from a local artist called Ken ‘Enfu’ Taya, and here is a full explanation of the mash-ups of American and Japanese icons that had been crammed into the poster, from his website.
Check out this cartoon tweeted by Jimmy Margulies. This is what it is all about : Apple can help the FBI open San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone, which could lead to information to track down other terrorists. Apple has declined. Farook’s iPhone 5c was legally obtained by the FBI with a search warrant for Farook’s Lexus. The FBI is suing Apple, and Apple has vowed to appeal if it loses its case. I think I side with Gabriel Malor’s point of view, here.
We always get a lot of winter rain from December through February here in the Pacific Northwest. And on Thursday it became official : this 2015-2016 season we are having the wettest winter on record* here in the Pacific Northwest.
*I am steering clear of the word ever, even though some TV news stations have bandied it about. Our rainfall records only go back 122 years to 1894. Earth is some 4.543 billion years old .. and who knows what deluges this spot we know call Seattle might have experienced through the eons?
Here is the Super Six restaurant where we had a burger and a beer tonight. We think the restaurant is located in a re-purposed gas station or automotive repair work station. Super Six refers to a kind of intake manifold on 70s and 80s car engines. One has to wonder with oil and gas prices as low as they are again, if fossil fuel engines will ever go away and be replaced by electric cars or hydrogen fuel cell cars. I see the Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell car did start selling in California .. but at an estimated 3,000 cars that will be sold this year, it’s off to a slow start, for sure.
Here is a boerboel*, a ‘new’ breed that debuted at the 2016 Westminster Dog Show held over the weekend in Madison Square Garden in New York City. The picture is from the CBS News website. (‘New’ because we had neighbors in South Africa with such a dog, and this was several decades ago!).
*Boerboel is the South African name for the breed, and it is pronounced boo-r-bull in Afrikaans. A simple translation is ‘farmer’s bull dog’. A more accurate translation might be a ‘Boer’s bull dog’.
Well ! It has been an eventful Presidents’ Day weekend. The country learned on Saturday that one of the nine Supreme Court of the United States had died (Antonin Scalia, of an apparent heart attack, at the age of 79). On Saturday night, there was a raucous debate among the six (down from 17) Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidential nomination. Donald Trump slaughtered a sacred Republican cow by accusing former Pres. George W. Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction, and of not keeping the country safe – since 9/11 happened on his watch. (The word lying or lie was used so many times in the debate that it must be some kind of record). And then to top it all off, former Pres. George W. Bush made his first big appearance in public since leaving office, to campaign for his younger brother’s sinking Presidential campaign in South Carolina. Once deemed the inevitable candidate against the presumable Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, the campaign of Jeb Bush now seems to be completely doomed. The Bushes are very well regarded in South Carolina, a state with air force bases, army bases, marine core bases and navy bases (!) .. but all of that still appears not to be good enough to make a difference for the Jeb Bush campaign. Forecasters give Trump a 73% chance of winning the SC primary and Bush all the way down in 4th or 5th place with a 1% moonshot.
It was a rainy weekend and Valentine’s 
Day in Seattle. The temperatures here were really mild, though, compared to what was going on across the continent in the northeast (see the graphic from CBS News). A friend from Portland, Oregon was visiting, and we played some tennis on the indoor courts at the Amy Yee Tennis Center. Hey, I could still hit the ball. It was the first time I had played tennis in a long time.
Here is a picture I took today of Amazon’s biospheres in downtown Seattle. Nobody seems quite sure what to make of these unusual structures .. are they ridiculous or something special and futuristic? ‘The goal of the new spherical space is to create an environment where employees can work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting’ according to the design document for the spheres .. and ‘The generative idea is that a plant-rich environment has many positive qualities that are not often found in a typical office setting’. Well, one thing is for sure : this is not a typical office setting !
It takes a fine instrument to detect gravitational waves : the the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory or LIGO. Check out this report in the Science section of the New York Times, of the first confirmed reading of gravitational waves (in Sept 2015). Einstein predicted that gravitational waves could come about during some cataclysmic events in the universe, such as two black holes that collide.
I see Meryl Streep’s remark ‘We are all Africans’ (she was responding to diversity questions at the Berlin Film Festival, and questions as to why, for the second year in a row, the Oscar nominations failed to recognize any minority actors), was panned .. the criticism being that it is a non-answer. That’s like saying ‘We are all humans’, which is true. Check out this fascinating picture that shows how modern humans migrated all over the continents, starting out in Africa. A bigger version of the picture is here.
The New Hampshire US Presidential Primary results are in, and it’s Trump and Sanders by wide margins .. somewhat expected in both cases (cannot trust those polls until the results actually do come in), and somewhat shocking as well. (That Trump could win. Time for some of those Republicans that split the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th places, drop out?).
Election results and maps are from the New York Times.
