a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
I packed my bags on Sunday and
traveled out on Monday morning. I was not going to the project office though. We now have users in the field that have started to use our system, so I drove down to Salinas after arriving at San Francisco airport.
It was very wet at San Francisco airport, and it rained all the way during my drive down to Salinas as well.
Target is my go-to-store for replenishing essential household and bathroom supplies such as paper towels, toilet paper, detergent, bar soap and ‘Soft Scrub’. The store does have a nice variety of all kinds of other stuff such as clothing, shoes, electronics, bedding, kitchen supplies, toys and stationery.
There was a time when shoppers would say jokingly ‘I’m going to Targét (a ‘French’ pronunciation) .. a nod at the stylish but affordable offerings of the store. I think the store has lost a little of its panache, though. I have not heard of the Targét moniker in a long, long time.
There are a lot of scenes from the city of Budapest in the 2015 spy-spoof flick ‘Spy’, starring Melissa McCarthy, Jude Law and Jason Statham.
Some of them feature the Gresham Palace, now a Four Seasons hotel. Hey! I know that place, and I love that building, I thought when I saw it on the screen. My colleague and I went there for cocktails many years ago. So I had to dig up the picture I took of it, and here it is.
The October
jobs report for the world’s largest economy (the USA, measured by gross domestic product*) was very positive : 270,000 jobs added. That’s a lot more than the 180,000 that had been expected. And economists now say a December federal funds rate hike is almost a certainty.
*Another way to compare the sizes of the economy in countries is by purchasing power parity. By this measure, the size of China’s economy is actually slightly larger than that of the USA.
Here is last Friday’s mushroom now in ‘full bloom’.
Alas, I have no toads in my backyard to come and sit on it !
The death rate diagram below is from Monday’s New York Times, from a study by two Princeton economists. It shows the shocking counter-trend of death rates for middle-aged white Americans. They do worse – far worse than any other industrialized nation – and worse than any other race and ethnic groups in the USA (African American, Latino, Asian), and other generations. And no, it’s not the big killers like heart disease and diabetes, says the article, but an epidemic of suicides and afflictions stemming from substance abuse: alcoholic liver disease and overdoses of heroin and prescription opioids. The article shot to the top of the most-emailed list, and attracted nearly 1,900 comments.
Today is election day for cities, counties and states across the USA. (Not quite as exciting as next year’s presidential election and US Senate or House of Representative elections, but at least it’s something, right?). It looks as if the ‘Let’s Move Seattle’ levy to improve transportation infrastructure is going to pass, as is the ‘Best Starts’ levy to increase funding for early education for very young kids. Ksharma Sawant, the unabashed socialist candidate for Seattle City Council, is leading in the polls as well.
In other local news, the rumors have been confirmed : Amazon has opened it’s first brick- and-mortar bookstore (actually made of brick and mortar) here in Seattle. Whatever out of this world books could they be offering inside, I wonder? The store is small, says the first reports – not nearly as big as a typical Barnes & Noble bookstore – but offers a nice experience. I will have to go and take a look. Surely there will be Kindles for sale as well !
It is 100 years ago this November
that Albert Einstein published his series of four papers called ‘The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity’, each separated from the other by a week: on the 4th, 11th, 18th and the 25th of November 1915. From the Einstein Archives Online : ‘In Einstein’s universe, gravity is not regarded as an exterior force, but rather as a property of space and time, or spacetime. Einstein’s curved four-dimensional spacetime ‘continuum’ is often likened to a suspended rubber sheet stretched taut, but deformed whenever heavy objects – stars, galaxies or any other matter – are placed on it. Thus, a massive body like the sun curves the spacetime around it and the planets move along these curved pathways of spacetime. As Einstein put it : ‘matter tells space how to bend; space tells matter how to move’.
It is of course one thing to put forth a philosophical theory, but Einstein did much more than that. He wrote up a set of ten equations known as the Einstein Field Equations that described the fundamental interactions of gravitation, matter and energy in spacetime.
Most of us here in the USA set our clocks back one hour on Saturday night (back to Standard Time). A state such as Arizona is on Mountain Standard Time all year. And these days only dumb, disconnected mechanical clocks require adjustment. My iPhone’s little clock is smart and changes on its own.
So where does my iPhone’s time come from? Well, it comes from GPS satellites that broadcast the time to cell towers, from where the smartphones pick it up. And GPS satellites get their times from atomic clocks at the US Naval Observatory (a whole bunch of them).
In 1967, scientists got together and defined one second as equivalent to the time it takes a cesium atom to move 9,192,631,770 times between two particular energy levels. That defines the time in terms of 16 decimal points of a second. Is that really necessary? Well, yes .. GPS satellites that are out of sync by as little of one billionth of a second with the master time will already result in inaccuracies of a few feet on the ground, so these GPS satellite times are literally synced to the nanosecond. Researchers are working on atomic fountain clocks, to push the definition of time out to 18 decimal points (a hundred times more accurate than today’s clocks, or an accuracy of 1 second in 300 million years). But at that point, relativity and quantum effects start to take hold : an atomic clock a few feet higher than one right next to it will consistently run slower than one at the lower height due to the differences in the earth’s gravity at the two points.
For further explanations and speculations on time measurement, check out this little video clip from Wired Magazine/ The Atlantic magazine link.