Month: June 2016

I learned of the terrorist attack in Istanbul on the radio, while driving back to the hotel. I watched a little of the reporting on TV, and then turned it off altogether.  I’m going to have to read a book such as Steven Pinker’s 2012 The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined – to boost my conviction that the world is still becoming a better, more civilized place (in spite of all the news to the contrary).  Pinker makes the point that we have been, and still are, are actually living in an unusually peaceful time the last few decades. 

We watched Hail, Caesar! (2016) last night, a Coen brothers movie – and a movie I suspect, that is liked better by film buffs and critics, than the average movie-goer.   For me the highlights were : the ‘water ballet’ performed by the Aqualilies, the sailors’ dance number featuring Channing Tatum, and the Russian submarine scene.   And : I know I should not romanticize war, but I love the Echelon Song that played out the movie as the credits rolled, sung by the Red Army Choir (also known as the Battle of the Red Guards, written in 1933).

Well, the votes are still being counted, but the BBC and ITV are both projecting that the LEAVE vote in the referendum in the UK will win.   It’s going to be ugly in the stock markets tomorrow (it already is tomorrow)in Asia), and hey –  I should plan a trip to London right away, to take advantage British Pound – US Dollar exchange rate!

P.S.  Not that it matters, but I would have voted for the UK to stay in the European Union.

 

The Panama Canal expansion opens on Sunday June 26 amid much fanfare and one of the worst shipping industry slumps ever.   Check out these two articles. This map is from an article in the Wall Street Journal.

P.S.  A reader commented on one of the articles that one can actually take a cruise on a container ship through the Suez and Panama canals (these are different cruises).  Maris Freight and others, have limited cabins one can reserve on their container ships, with some cruises lasting up to 180 days.  Hmm.  Maybe Princess Cruises is still a better bet.

 

The next two pictures are from a New York Times article called : The New Panama Canal – A Risky Bet, How a $3.1 Billion Expansion Collided With Reality. The final cost far exceeded $5 billion, actually. The project was awarded to a contractor of who, the other bidders said that it could not even pour the concrete for what they quoted.   There are other problems, too.   The new locks are not long enough for tug boats to maneuver giant modern container ships.   The latest generation of these ships can carry 18,000 TEU (Twenty Foot Equivalent Unit) containers, more than 22 times the maximum capacity of the 800-TEU ships introduced in 1956 !

Below is a postcard from an antique store in Pike Place Market that caught my eye on Sunday, and that I bought.

[From Wikipedia] Llanfairpwllgwyngyll or Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll is a large village and community on the island of Anglesey in Wales, situated on the Menai Strait next to the Britannia Bridge and across the strait from Bangor.   The long form of the name was invented for promotional purposes in the 1860s; with 58 characters it is the longest place name in Europe, and the second longest official one-word place name in the world.

The meaning of the name is given below the Welsh name, in The Queen’s English.  And where is the little village?  Check out the marker on the Google Map.

 

‘Between a Rock and a Brexit’ is the title of a short WSJ video explaining why Gibraltar is on edge ahead of the Brexit referendum.  Gibraltar, famous for its Rock, and a peninsula sticking out from the southernmost part of Spain where it almost touches the continent of Africa, is fearful that Spain might reassert its claims to the territory, or make it harder for tourists to visit.

There was a Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on Wednesday; a meeting with a foregone conclusion that there would be no increase in the federal funds rate, though.  Where are the days when the Fed could increase rates by 0.25% without risking to destroy the world economy? .. and will inflation ever get to 2%, and the funds rate ever reach say, 4%, again?  Janet Yellen admitted that the looming Brexit* possibility was also a factor in the decision to keep rates the same.

*The upcoming referendum on Thu Jun 23, where Britons will vote whether the UK should stay in, or exit the European Union.

My Echo with ‘Alexa’ inside did arrive today.
It was easy to set up and connect to my home wi-fi network. There is a companion app for one’s phone that actually provides a trail of one’s voice interactions with ‘Ms. Alexa’.

Alexa does not have answers for every question (of course), and she does not speak Afrikaans or German (yet).  Once or twice while she was playing music I had to raise my voice and ‘yell’ at her to stop.  (The command is ‘Alexa, stop’.).   But it’s great to have a voice-activated radio, music player, shopping list assistant, to-do list assistant, and kitchen timer.

I have heard good things about the Amazon Echo and finally succumbed and ordered one. (It is due on my doorstep tomorrow). An Echo is a voice-command device that answers questions, puts events on one’s Google calendar, reads the calendar, and plays music from one’s on-line library, among other things.  I’m tempering my expectations a little, though.  I wonder if it will also say ‘Sorry you are having trouble’ (as Siri on my iPhone sometimes says).   What it cannot say, is ‘Here is what I found’, and just show a screen with search results. There is no screen.

Here are my first battery of test questions for Alexa*. (Poor Alexa).  Alexa! How fast is a cheetah?  Alexa! Where is Cape Town?  Alexa! Do you speak Afrikaans? Alexa!  Can you make me some coffee? (That would be a NO). Alexa! Where is the nearest Starbucks? Alexa! Will Donald Trump win the election?

*Alexa is how to summon the Echo.  If Alexa happens to be a person in the household, the Echo can be reprogrammed to respond to ‘Amazon’.

We marvel at the smartphones we carry, and the information we can get from them – but it’s really the server farms from Amazon and Google and Facebook and Apple that host, find and route the information to us.  Intel makes 99% of the server chips in the world, and the state of the art is the Intel Xeon E5 v4, the company’s latest server chip and the engine of the internet.

From a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article : a top-of-the-line E5 is the size of a postage stamp, retails for $4,115, and uses about 60 % more energy per year than a large Whirlpool refrigerator.  Transistors were 32-nanometers wide in production in 2009, went to 22 nm in 2011, and then to 14 nm in late 2014.   A width of 5 nm is considered the absolute limit of the current technology.   .. but beyond 5nm there will be new materials—some think that carbon nanotubes will replace silicon transistors—and perhaps entirely new technologies, such as neuromorphic computing (circuits designed to mimic the human brain) and quantum computing (individual atomic particles in lieu of transistors)’.

Yes.  I will want one : one of those new quantum computers.

There was heart-breaking coverage of the family and friends of the victims today on TV.  A tearful, anguished mom told Matt Lauer on the Today Show this morning that she had not yet heard from her son Christopher; had gone by all the area hospitals, and had still not found him or found word of him.  (Christopher’s name was added to an official list of victims released by the city of Orlando at 1.20 pm on Monday).

Congressman Jim Hines from Connecticut walked out in protest when (yet another) minute of silence for gun-violence victims* was called for on the House floor by Speaker Paul Ryan.   *The USA ranks No 12 on a world list of per capita gun deaths, just behind Burundi, a war-torn African country that the US State department warns travelers not to go to.

On the Presidential campaign trail, Hillary Clinton urged Americans to stand together, while Donald Trump renewed his call for a ban on Muslim migration into the United States, and intoned several times that Pres. Obama ‘knew something more’ (I’m paraphrasing). When the Washington Post reported that Donald Trump seems to connect President Obama to Orlando shooting, he revoked Washington Post journalists’ press credentials : they can no longer attend his rallies or interview him.  So much for freedom of the press in Mr Trump’s world.

The white all-caps letters on CNN’s home page turn blood-red as you click on it (was the color chosen on purpose by the web designer?).  From TIME magazine : Omar Mateen (age 29) shot more than 100 people inside Pulse Orlando, a popular and crowded gay nightclub, where he held people hostage, about 2 a.m. on Sunday, police said. He was armed with an assault rifle and a handgun and also had a “suspicious device,” Orlando Police Chief John Mina said.  Mateen was killed during a gun battle with police about 5 a.m. when a SWAT team entered the club to rescue the hostages, according to the Associated Press.   Was it an act of terrorism? Yes – of course it was.

I did not know that ‘Delete your account’ is a long-running meme, but as the LA Times explains here :

“Delete your account” may seem like a funny retort, but it’s got some cultural weight to it. The phrase has been a long-running meme, particularly in the Black Twitter community, and is used as a combination of insult and advice. Sometimes, if someone says something so stupid that it is beyond redemption, people will gently, or harshly, advise them to remove themselves from the Internet.

Or: “Delete your account.”

So when Hillary Clinton responded to Trump’s attack, that was what was behind it. Will Trumps insulting tweets help him or hurt him in the next few months in the run-up to November? We are sure to find out.