Month: December 2018

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Wednesday/ at the airport

I made it to the airport. We will board in 30 mins or so.
It’s great to get to this point!  Just to get packed up and the house taken care of before a long trip, leaves me frazzled. But now I can relax a little.

Here’s the engine and tail of Xiamen Air, based in Xiamen, China (across from Taiwan, on the mainland). This is a Boeing 787-8, and I believe it flies the Xiamen-Shenzhen-Seattle route. That’s a symbolic egret on the tail.
Here’s Hainan Air taxiing for take-off to either Beijing, or Shanghai. This is a Boeing 787-9 Dreamliner that was made in Charleston, SC. (I looked up its details on planespotters.net with the registration number: B-7667).
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Tuesday night/ my bags are packed ..

.. well, almost. I’m heading out to Tokyo in the morning, as part of my itinerary to get me to Perth, Australia, in a few days.

It’s great to have a direct flight from Seattle to Tokyo, but then: there is only Pacific Ocean between the two cities (unless one can make a stop on those Aleutian Islands off the coast of Alaska!). I’m going to cross the international date line on the way there and fly right into Thursday afternoon in Japan .. but I will get the time back on my return.
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Monday/ Trump’s ‘Bottomless Pinocchio’ statements

From The Washington Post today: ‘The Fact Checker’ has evaluated false statements President Trump has made repeatedly and analyzed how often he reiterates them. The claims included here – which we’re calling “Bottomless Pinocchios” – are limited to ones that he has repeated 20 times and were rated as Three or Four Pinocchios by the Fact Checker.

  • The Trump tax cut was the biggest in history – Trump repeated some version of this claim 123 times
  • Overstating the size of U.S. trade deficits – Trump repeated some version of this claim 117 times
  • The U.S. economy has never been stronger – Trump repeated some version of this claim 99 times
  • Inflating our NATO spending – Trump repeated some version of this claim 87 times
  • The U.S. has started building the wall -Trump repeated some version of this claim 86 times
  • The U.S. has the loosest immigration laws in the world — thanks to Democrats – Trump repeated some version of this claim 52 times
  • Democrats colluded with Russia during the campaign – Trump repeated some version of this claim 42 times
  • The border wall will stop drug trafficking – Trump repeated some version of this claim 40 times
  • U.S. Steel is building many new plants – Trump repeated some version of this claim 37 times
  • The U.S. has spent $6 trillion (or more) on Middle East wars – Trump repeated some version of this claim 36 times
  • Thousands of MS-13 members have been removed from the country – Trump repeated some version of this claim 33 times
  • McCain’s vote was the only thing that blocked repeal of the Affordable Care Act – Trump repeated some version of this claim 30 times
  • Robert S. Mueller III is biased because of conflicts of interest – Trump repeated some version of this claim 30 times
  • Inflating gains from a 2017 trip to Saudi Arabia – Trump repeated some version of this claim 23 times
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Sunday/ rain day

The rain is back after a dry week, and we did not see the sun all day.
It’s not all bad, though: the cloud cover and rain keep the day temperatures well above freezing. Today it was 46°F (8°C) here in the city.

Here’s 15th Ave at 4.30pm today – the sun had set at 4.18 pm already. My iPhone Xs should do a lot better than my old 6s in low light. The Xs has a camera sensor (made by Sony, by the way) that is double the size of the 6s, and that has larger pixels as well. Larger pixels catch more light photons per pixel for a sharper, truer picture. 
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Saturday/ 2019, as a Star Wars opening crawl

A someone on Twitter says, this summary of Trump & his presidency heading into 2019, from the Washington Post (by Robert Costa and Philip Rucker), reads like a Star Wars opening crawl:
‘Facing the dawn of his third year in office and his bid for reelection, Trump is stepping into a political hailstorm. Democrats are preparing to seize control of the House in January with subpoena power to investigate corruption. Global markets are reeling from his trade war. The United States is isolated from its traditional partners. The investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference is intensifying. And court filings Friday in a separate federal case implicated Trump in a felony’.

‘Trump Wars’ The Year 2019. The Washington Post reporting as a Star Wars opening crawl. (I popped the text into a tool online that creates Star Wars opening crawls, with dramatic music in the background). Will we live in ‘interesting times’, as the old Chinese curse says?
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Friday/ new phone setup: complete

I snapped a picture of the trumpeting African elephant in my wild animal collection for my lock screen, for now.

I think I have my new phone set up, finally. I store a lot of stuff on the phone, not in the cloud. (I might be in the cloud/s, or on another continent, wanting to get to my data).  So I transferred some 12 Gb of music from iTunes on my desktop computer, a selection of favorite photo folders (animals and friends & family photos), and updated my offline Google maps.

I also fired up all my commonly used apps one by one. For some, I had to enter my username again, and dig up the password (from my Excel cheat sheet), but now I think I have most of the passwords saved on the iCloud keychain.

The Face ID facial recognition system on the phone is impressive, but one has to wonder if it is as secure as Touch ID (fingerprint). My other big gripe with Apple is the removal of the headphone jack, something that really made me hesitate to get the new phone. (There is a headphone jack connector available .. but in time I might spring for a new pair of bluetooth noise-canceling Bose headphones. I just refuse to wear Apple’s wireless Airpods, point blank. I think they look silly, uber-geeky, cheeky. And I will be sure to lose them in no time at all).

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Thursday/ my new camera, uh – phone

I ran out to the Apple store today to upgrade my iPhone 6s camera to an iPhone Xs camera. (It’s a little joke. Of course the iPhone Xs functions as a phone as well! .. and has a bigger, brighter screen; more powerful processor; and more storage).

Here are some first pictures that I took in Volunteer Park here in Seattle. (Note: The last two pictures will take longer than usual to load over slow connections. I did not reduce their pixel count).

I reduced the pixel sizes of these photos of the duck pond (male and female mallards). These are just to show the 2x optical zoom (top picture), and then setting back to the 1x regular zoom. It’s nice to have choice, and there is a big difference!
Mr Squirrel is nibbling on something, not very perturbed – used to photographers, it seems. This is 2x zoom; original 4,032 x 3,024 pixel size, but cropped somewhat to show just the squirrel.
This is an original size 3,024 x 3,024 square picture. (This is the park’s iconic Black Sun sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, with the Space Needle in the distance). The camera sensor & software does a good job of balancing the intense colors close to the setting sun with the pastels in the sky and the clouds.
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Wednesday/ Christmas light enchantments

The Seattle Mariners baseball field – south of downtown – is set up as a Christmas light maze (the Seattle ‘Enchant’ Christmas market and festival). So that’s where we went after beers & dinner tonight. There were forests of light trees, a scavenger hunt for Santa’s reindeer in the maze, and a little ice rink as well.

In a forest of light trees ..
A giant snowflake ..
.. and here’s Rudolph (the Red-nosed Reindeer), one of nine of Santa’s reindeer, hidden in the maze. Some of them are lying down, and it took us a little while to find the last one, called Cupid.

These skaters look very comfortable on the ice of the little ice rink. We did not set foot on there! [Photo credit: thanks to Bryan for the picture].
And here’s a selfie of the friends – from left to right Ken, Steve, Willem, Bryan & Gary. Yes, it was a little chilly! 43 °F/ 6 °C. [Photo credit: thanks to Gary for the picture]. 

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Tuesday/ an echidna puggle

Man! I was spending way too much time scrolling through my Twitter feed today.  Trump’s ‘I’m a tariff man’ tweet inflicted heavy losses on the stock market. And it’s official: Seattle is getting a new NHL (National Hockey League) franchise team.

But the tweet of the day for me, was of this cute echidna puggle, born in Sydney’s Taronga Zoo.  They are very unusual mammals: the young hatch out of a leathery egg in their mother’s pouch, and stay there for 45 to 55 days.

 

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Monday/ the cosmic perspective

I have finished reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s quick-read book called Astrophysics for People in a Hurry.  In the front is a quotation from Tyson, that I love: ‘The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you’.

Humans have certainly made strides to understand the mysteries of the universe, but we need another Newton, another Einstein, to help us out with understanding what we now call dark matter and dark energy.

Towards the end of the book, Tyson also offers: The cosmic perspective opens our eyes to the universe, not as a benevolent cradle designed to nurture life, but as a cold, lonely, hazardous place, forcing us to reassess the value of all humans to one another’.

This picture is not in the book, but the epochs shown in it are described. The Inflation Theory proposes a period of extremely rapid (exponential) expansion of the universe during its first fantastically short instants of time. Then it took 380,000 years for the temperature to come down to 3,000 K for atoms to form. Right now we are at the 13.8 billion year mark, and the universe is expanding at an ever increasing rate – something we have only learned over the last few decades. The best explanation is that dark matter and dark energy are at work. [Picture courtesy of Particle Data Group, 2015].
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Sunday/ a first look at First Light

We went down to the sales office for an elegant new condominium tower called First Light today, just to see what’s going on there.

The development will be done by Westbank, a Vancouver, B.C.-based firm.
It is still early days, though: the tower’s completion is only scheduled for some time in 2022.

The proposed First Light condominium tower (459 units, 48 floors) was designed by architect James KM Cheng. The design is somewhat minimalist, but features balconies for all the units, and check out that floating roof-top swimming pool (the beige-colored platform complete with tiny lounge chairs).
This is a sample of the steel-wire-and-glass-disk ‘curtains’ (designed by artist John Hogan), that will be strung outside the tower’s podium (lower five floors). It should add texture from afar, and reflect different colors of sunlight, depending on the viewing angle.
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Saturday Night Live/ the ‘cold open’

‘President Trump’ was again featured in this Saturday’s SNL cold open, portraying him and other world leaders at the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires. Hmm. Is this really funny? I thought. In this case, Putin and Mohammed Bin Salman are – by all credible accounts in the real world – savages, directly responsible for murdering their political enemies. They should be persona non grata at the G20 (and maybe they are). So is it cool to ‘celebrate’ and poke fun at them?

I guess I’m too serious. This is simply an offer to the audience to escape the horrors of the real universe, and jump into a parallel one of parody, for a little while.  Another problem could be that I only have one beer on a Saturday night, and not three or four, as I’m sure most in the studio audience must have had!

‘Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night Live!’ yells the cold open* cast of characters, from left to right: ‘Michael Cohen’ (Ben Stiller), ‘Rudy Giuliani’ (Kate McKinnon), ‘Melania Trump’ (Cecily Strong), ‘Donald Trump’ (Alec Baldwin), ‘Vladimir Putin’ (Beck Bennett), ‘Mohammed Bin Salman’ (Fred Armisen). *In television production parlance, the ‘cold opening’ or ‘cold open’ is a one to five minute mini-act at the beginning of the show, even before the opening credits, that is used to set up the episode and catch the audience’s attention.