So now that it seems certain that the ‘red line’ has been crossed by the Syrian government (using chemical weapons against civilians) .. what should the US government do?  The UK has indicated that they are out.   Secretary of State John Kerry made a passionate case for action today, but President Obama’s response was much more measured.  ‘No boots on the ground’, no open-ended commitment.  It’s ironical that Syria is smack-bang next door to Iraq, where the USA has burnt through all its credibility with the 10-year war there, the start of which turned up zero weapons of mass destruction.  (Which was held up as the main justification for the Iraq war by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell).  And how sad that a brutal civil war that has now killed more than 100,000 people, rages in a country with two of the oldest inhabited cities in the world : Damascus and Aleppo.

Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of the ‘I have a dream’ speech by civil rights leader Martin Luther King (August 28, 1963).  a panel of more than 130 scholars got together in 1999 to rate the best speeches of the 20th century and King’s speech ranked No. 1.  Dr King was assassinated 4½ years later, on April 4, 1968 .. but he did see the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson : a landmark piece of civil rights legislation in the United States that outlawed major forms of discrimination against racial, ethnic, national and religious minorities, and women.

 

Watch out for those summer colds!  They are worse than ones that will get you in winter, says this picture panel is Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal.  I know, because I have had one this summer that lingered on for weeks.  Blech !

Daniel Tammet is a savant, but not quite the kind portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1998 film Rain Man : he can function socially and describe what he experiences as he performs mind-boggling feats.  In 2004, he recited pi to 22,514 places (it took 5 hours 9 mins).  He learned conversational Icelandic in one week. Check out an interview that Morley Safer did way back in 2007, here :  CBS ’60 minutes’ interview.   Daniel says he sees numbers as colors and shapes.  His book ‘Thinking in Numbers’ has been published recently, and shown here on TV on Monday, and so I am going to buy it.

As a tennis player (ex-tennis player?, since I play so rarely these days), I found this article about little-known 35-year old tennis pro Michael Russell, that Businessweek calls ‘tennis’s #1 loser’, very interesting.  His wife travels full-time with him in a supporting role (picks up his rackets from the stringer, buys groceries, sits in the stands when it’s almost empty).  ‘The sport is basically about how well you can cope with losing’, says Michael.  He can still chase down balls few other humans can, but at 5’8″ is at a disadvantage against tall, lean players.  They mention a weekend trip to Richard Branson’s private island where rich guys pay to play with the pros, and say ‘it was awesome; the only thing is it kind of ruins everything else for you afterwards’. Tennis players don’t have to deal with concussions, but the game is rough on the joints. Michael has had his share of injuries : knee surgery, and has torn his rotator cuff (tendons in the shoulder joint).

So .. with the school year barely getting underway on Tuesday, a mentally ill 20-year old guy walks into an Atlanta area elementary school with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammo.  Who knows what would have happened had a smart, savvy bookkeeper not been in the right place at the right time, and talked him right out of it until the SWAT team came.  In a separate incident that defies comprehension for its pure evil, three Oklahoma teens were rounded up for assassinating an Australian student/ baseball player that was out jogging, in cold blood.  They were ‘bored’, said one.  Some Australians say they should boycott the USA altogether and not set foot here – and who can blame them?

John Oliver from the Daily Show poked fun at Elon Musk’s Hyperloop tonight (the futuristic proposal of a tube for 800 mph/ 30 mins of travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles). ‘It’s a cross between a Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table’, says Mr Musk.  He is criticizing the current high speed rail plans as ‘too expensive and too slow’ but says he cannot take on the Hyperloop right now.   He has his hands full with building rockets and Teslas.

My block here on Capital Hill had its annual Block Party today. We block off the street and socialize for a few hours with each other. It was well attended, and of course I shocked some people on the block when I told them I have been living in my house for 11 years.  (Well .. I travel a lot, and I use the back entrance, I say every time).  So it was nice to make new acquaintances and renew old ones.   I learned that the husband of a couple on the corner is from Australia.  He survived adjusting to the Seattle weather, and they still travel to Australia regularly.  He noted that Qantas hands out pyjamas to their first class and business class passengers .. which prompted me to search for it online.  (It’s gray with a black Qantas kangeroo on).  And I found a report from the Australian Herald Sun about a couple in first class that held up a Qantas A380 flight from Los Angeles : there were no extra-large pyjamas available for them.  They got off the airplane and went out on a flight the following day. The pyjamas are designed by Akira Isogawa, one of Australia’s most prominent contemporary fashion designers. Got to have ’em!

This is from a news clip that was carried on CNN, and also posted on Yahoo.  Chinese state media in the city of Luohe in Henan tried to pass off a big hairy dog as a lion.

It was 10 years ago to the day on Wednesday that the Eastern Interconnection Blackout left 50 million people out of power for some 48 hours.  A series of uncorrected problems in northern Ohio (tree limbs falling on power lines, operators not getting information quickly enough and not acting quickly enough)  developed to a point that a cascading blackout of the entire eastern grid became inevitable.  So what is an ‘interconnection’, and have we started to address some of the vulnerabilities in the grid?  Interconnections are collections of electricity utilities that are electrically tied together during normal system conditions that operate at a synchronized frequency.  These interconnections can in turn be tied to each other with High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power transmission lines, or with variable frequency transformers.   The construction of the Tres Amigas Superstation was announced in 2009 and is about to be put into operation.  The goal of tying together three major power grids is to increase the reliability of the national grid, and to make it easier to accommodate the transmission of renewable power from one region to another.

 

Here is the news
Coming to you every hour on the hour
(Here is the news)
The weather’s fine but there may be a meteor shower..   – From the song ‘Here is the news’ by Electric Light Orchestra (1982)

 

The Perseid Meteor Shower of 2013 (it comes around every year) is said to be more visible than usual with the moon out of the way.  So late last night I did go outside and tried to see a ‘shooting star’ (a misnomer for a meteoroid), but with the trees and the clouds in the way I had no luck.  I think it will help to have a powerful telescope as well !