a weblog of whereabouts & interests, since 2010
My walkabout on Friday took me by the Russian Orthodox Church on 13th Avenue here on Capitol Hill. The blue-roofed canopy at the front door is missing and hopefully just being renovated before being put back in its place. Seattle has about 10,000 Russian-speaking residents.
Plutonium 
was made in the laboratory by bombarding uranium with deuterons (an isotope of hydrogen consisting of a proton and a neutron), and named after the (then-) planet Pluto. So it is an artificial element, and there is likely no plutonium on Pluto. Uranium is the last of the natural elements (atomic number 92) in the periodic table. When the historic Iran Nuclear Deal was announced this week, uranium and plutonium was in the news. Here is the New York Times’s simple guide to the terms of the deal.
Here’s a nice animation from NASA’s website to show the close-up detail that we know have gotten with the intrepid New Horizons explorer’s flyby.
I was blissfully unaware of the Juan de Fuca Plate tectonic plate, 
the edge of which runs alongside the Seattle coast, when I moved here in 2000. That did not last long, because in 2001 there was a 6.8 magnitude earthquake in Washington State, the Nisqually earthquake. It was deep down and caused some property damage but there were no casualties. A new compelling article by Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker with alarmist undertones and cataclysmic scenarios reminds us of the 9.0 magnitude Cascadia earthquake from Jan 26, 1700. And that the area is overdue for the next 9.0 earthquake. The logic is irrefutable : ‘ .. we now know that the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get two hundred and forty-three, which is Cascadia’s recurrence interval: the average amount of time that elapses between earthquakes. That timespan is dangerous both because it is too long—long enough for us to unwittingly build an entire civilization on top of our continent’s worst fault line—and because it is not long enough. Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
I am not in San Francisco on the project site, but I am still working on it ! In fact, our code and configuration settings for our solution made it into the production system which is called PR1. SAP installations are gigantic databases with all kinds of associated database servers, application servers, web servers and other connections. The PR1 refers to the Production system server installation, and distinguishes it from other supporting installations such as a QAS-Quality Assurance and DEV-Development installation.
Anyway, making it into the Production system after 15 months of work is a big deal. I thought : I guess we can say our solution has shipped. ‘Ship’ is a cult word in information technology. It is the ultimate deadline in a series of deadlines in delivering a new product, or a major upgrade of a product. There is money involved, and careers, and reputations – all of which could be tarnished with a missed shipping date. Ouch.
Gas Works Park here in Seattle is a 19.1 acres public park on the site of the former Seattle Gas Light Company gasification plant. It is located on the north shore of Lake Union. The park contains remnants of the a coal gasification plant that had operated from 1906 to 1956. The city bought the facility to make a park out of it, which opened to the public in 1975. Here are some pictures. I had never been to Gas Works Park (in spite of its hosting of the 4th of July fireworks every year), a situation that had to be corrected immediately !
I have not checked up recently on the world’s skyscraper constructions .. so here is an update! (In another life in another universe I would have been an architect, I believe). The Kingdom Tower is under construction in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. It will be the first tower to reach all the way up to 1,000 m with an inhabitable floor count of 167 (2 below ground), and a total height of 252 floors if the uninhabitable ones in the spire of the tower is counted as well. It is estimated cost is US$ 1.23 billion, and it was designed by American architect Adrian Smith, who also designed Burj Khalifa.
Check out http://www.skyscrapercenter.com/ and Tallest 20 in 2020 for beautiful line drawings of the world’s skyscrapers.
It’s Shark Week on Discovery Channel here in the USA .. and here is a goblin shark gobbling up a fish. These stills are from the Discovery website, here. This creature is a living fossil – in that it is the only one remaining from a family of sharks with a lineage dating back 125 million years. Its specialized jaws can snap forward to capture prey. The elongated flattened snout is covered with ‘ampullae of Lorenzini’ that enable it to sense minute electric fields, as little as a 10 millionth of a volt.
I could tell the tourist season is in full swing when in 3 minutes I spotted the Emerald City Trolley, the Duck and the monorail during my visit to downtown on Wednesday. Tourists that go up in the Space Needle report that there is a haziness in the air looking north, and even looking south to Mt Rainier. Much of the haziness is actually smoke from wildfires from way across the border in British Columbia, Canada!
Wednesday was a rough day for big technology in the United States. First, a computer problem in United Airlines’s reservation system caused the FAA to impose what is known as a ground stop at 8:26 a.m. ET. The stop only lasted about two hours, but this impacted 4,900 flights worldwide. Then at 11.32 am ET the New York Stock Exchange went out for 3 ½ hours. While this was unnerving, these days there are some 11 other exchanges that could still be used for trading, though. Finally, Microsoft announced it was laying off 7,800 jobs as its mobile phone unit and Nokia acquisition continue to struggle. Far, far away in Finland, the head of web communications in the Prime Minister’s Office, Pekka Pekkala minced no words about the impact of these layoffs on the city of Salo (pop.54,000).
It was the warmest June ever here in Seattle with eight days at 85°F (30°C) or higher in June. On Sunday, east of the Cascade Mountains, the mercury hit 113°F (45°C) in Walla Walla in central Washington State. Yikes!
I usually manage to cool down my bedroom during 
warm summer evenings by opening the window for a few hours .. but that strategy has not worked these last few weeks. So it was a relief to get my hands on a used portable conditioner, and now I can cool down the bedroom nicely before bedtime.
.. or are you just looking to get shot? The New York Police Dept sent out a tweet discouraging people from buying this cell phone case. I looked it up – it was on sale on the web site http://www.japantrendshop.com/ but they pulled the item from the catalog. (Smart thing to do). Go for the ‘Samurai Umbrella’ instead, also on offer on the website.
Check out the cool Space Needle ‘panocam’ at this link. If it is night time, one can always click on the ‘Best Views’ links on the panel on the right to see recorded views from previous days. This one below shows a cruise ship at one of the two terminals here. In 2015, Seattle will host 192 cruise ships and more than 895,000 passengers. (I still have to take my obligatory cruise up to Alaska! Yes!).
We celebrated Independence Day on Saturday here in the United States. Here is a picture of the fireworks over Seattle’s Lake Union. The colors of the fireworks were mostly red, white and blue (of course).
This gleaming low-slung machine that I spotted here on Republican St and 15th Ave may look as if it is about to vroom across the intersection – but it actually made no sound as it accelerated forward and turned left.
It is BMW’s plug-in hybrid sports car made from carbon fiber and aluminum, the i8. Tesla owners can rightfully point out their cars are completely electric .. but it’s a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. The i8 is shaped like a supercar. I see a reviewer reports that the seats are so low that you ‘roll’ out of it after nudging the butterfly doors up and away from you.
Check out these charts of the Shanghai Stock Exchange’s composite index. As of the end of the day Friday in China, the index is down 27% from its June 12 peak, wiping out some $2.4 trillion of value. Individual investors* account for about 80 percent of trading on mainland Chinese exchanges.
*Investor or trader or speculator? I’d say one would you have stay in the market for oh, one year, to be called an investor.
Will the Grexit happen? (Greece exiting from the Eurozone and going back to the drachma, and forge ahead on its own). Greece owes its creditors way more than it can pay, even after several years of painful austerity that has crimped its economy by 25%, and left half of young people unemployed. On Tuesday night it defaulted on a key payment to the International Monetary Fund, becoming the first developed nation to ever default on its international obligations.
So now there is a referendum on Sunday, which makes no sense in a way. As the New York Times says : Imagine the fate of your country hangs on a yes-or-no question. The question is drafted in cryptic, bureaucratic language and asks you to decide on an economic program that no longer exists. Leaders in neighboring countries are begging you to vote yes. Your government is begging you to vote no.
There was a smattering of stargazers and their telescopes out at Volunteer Park on Tuesday night when I walked by there. I soon found out the excitement was over the two brightest planets in the night sky – Venus and Jupiter – that were to appear very close together in the night sky. They only appear to do so, though, because of their locations in the night sky. At the time of the conjunction, Venus was 49 million miles from Earth while Jupiter was more than 10 times farther, 564 million miles. Check out this video from NASA. As time goes by, the planets appear closer together.
It’s already warm here in Seattle with temperatures heading toward 90 °F/ 32 °C for the weekend. (The warm weather usually arrives after the 4th of July weekend). The dry conditions and warm weather is not a good combination, of course. A fire in the Wenatchee area in central Washington State has destroyed 24 homes and heavily damaged three businesses since Sunday, and thousands of people have been told to be ready to evacuate on a moment’s notice. Hopefully more fires can be contained early on. The 2014 Carlton Complex was the largest wildfire in Washington State history : the fire burned 300 homes and 400 square miles.
The City of Seattle has painted 11 crosswalks in the Capitol Hill neighborhood with rainbow colors to just in time for the weekend’s Gay Pride celebrations. It’s not an original idea, though – the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco has had a few of these since October of last year.
