Category: General

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.

Did Shakespeare not say ‘All the world’s a stage’? And (my favorite quote), from Einstein : ‘Reality is a very persistent illusion’.  At last week’s 2016 recode technology conference in San Francisco, Elon Musk remarked that life as we know it, may in fact be a computer simulation.

Here is his argument ..

The strongest argument for us being in a simulation probably is the following: 40 years ago we had pong. Like, two rectangles and a dot. That was what games were. Now, 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously, and it’s getting better every year. Soon we’ll have virtual reality, augmented reality.
If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality, even if that rate of advancement drops by a thousand from what it is now. Then you just say, okay, let’s imagine it’s 10,000 years in the future, which is nothing on the evolutionary scale.
So given that we’re clearly on a trajectory to have games that are indistinguishable from reality, and those games could be played on any set-top box or on a PC or whatever, and there would probably be billions of such computers or set-top boxes, it would seem to follow that the odds that we’re in base reality is one in billions.
Tell me what’s wrong with that argument. Is there a flaw in that argument?

So this prompted The Late Show’s Stephen Colbert in his introduction on Thursday night’s show, to ask his assistant Paul, if he thought that was possible – that we’re in a giant simulation. ‘Hmm, I don’t know’ replied Paul.  And just then Pinky from Pac-Man* ambushed them and made them disappear.

*[From Wikipedia] Pac-Man (Japanese: パックマン Pakkuman) is an arcade game developed by Namco and first released in Japan on May 21, 1980.  It was created by Japanese video game designer Toru Iwatani. It was licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway and released in October 1980. Immensely popular from its original release to the present day, Pac-Man is considered one of the classics of the medium, and an icon of 1980s popular culture.

Check out this political cartoon (by Matt Wuerker; I found it on politico.com).   Bernie Sanders received a hero’s welcome in his hometown of Burlington, Vermont, today.  He vowed last night ‘to go all the way’ to the Democratic Party’s National Convention in Philadelphia in July to try to make his case to be the nominee.

Well, the math is utterly against him.  He does not have the number of pledged delegates from the primaries, nor the support of the so-called super-delegates that he needs.   The cartoon is also a reference to the 2016 NBA Finals that are underway : the Golden State Warriors vs. the Cleveland Cavaliers. Stephen Curry from the Warriors has made such a name for himself with his 3-point shots that some analysts have called him the greatest shooter in NBA history. Finally : there is no 7-point shot in basketball.  Yes, there is one more primary election (Washington D.C), the two seconds on the clock, but the cartoonist says the game is effectively over.

Say what you want : it is quite a milestone¹ in American politics to see a woman nominated as a major-party candidate for President.  It has not happened in 240 years.  And can the nation ‘elect 43 white guys, then a black guy, and then a woman?’ asked Chris Matthews on MSNBC tonight.  We will see in November.  And What Will Bernie² Do (Now?) is the other question.

¹ A very interesting question is why the USA, for all its promotion of equality for women, took so long to reach this milestone.   As long ago as 1969, there was Golda Meir (Prime Minister of Israel), Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher in 1979 (Prime Minister of the United Kingdom) and more recently since 2005, Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany) .. and many many more female national leaders.

² Bernie Sanders, her Democratic Party Primary Election opponent.  He wanted to make the case that he has ‘momentum’ and a better chance of beating Trump in the general election, but it really does not look as if he will win California tonight.   The Democratic party has to be nice – very nice – to him, though.  They cannot afford to rebuff his supporters, and have them not go to the polls in November!

 

Here’s another flyer that landed in my mail box, for the Banfield pet hospital. It reminds me of the Siamese cat my brothers and I had as kids.  Her name was Sarina : the name of one of my mom’s acquaintances that we found so strange that we giggled about it – and promptly decided that it was a great name for the cat!  (The acquaintance never found out about the cat named after her, as far as I know).

The result of the referendum I mentioned yesterday, is in : some 77% of voters said no to a basic income.  Here is a report from the BBC.

The month of May’s US jobs numbers were the worst in more than five years : only 38,000 new jobs – when some 150,000 had been expected.

I see the Swiss referendum is coming up on Sunday June 5th : the one in which Swiss citizens will decide if their government should pay out a basic income to everyone. The Economist reports here that Finland and the Netherlands are planning limited experiments in which some citizens are paid a monthly income of roughly €1,000 ($1,100). But as the New York Times writes – while admitting that the American safety net needs fixing – an universal basic income is a poor tool to fight poverty.  A basic income is a powerful disincentive to get a job – and jobs give people status, and for many is a way to structure and improve their lives.

Here’s a cute doggie picture, animated by Google pictures.  (I did not take the pictures). If one has a series of pictures, Google Pictures can be used to make an animated .gif picture out of them.

A new ‘longest tunnel in the world’ opened today : the Gotthard Base Tunnel, after 17 years of construction, and running 57 km (35 miles) long under the Swiss Alps. It is 8,000 feet, or one-and-a-half vertical miles deep in the earth in some places. The tunnel reduces travel time from Zurich to Milan from 3.5 hours to 2.5 hours.  All the more reason for me to go visit Switzerland (I have never been there), and experience the 20 minute tunnel ride!  Check out these great pictures from the International  Business Times website.

 

 

 

We remember our fallen soldiers every Memorial Day in the United States.  (Veteran’s Day in November is to thank all veterans from the armed services, those that had served in wars and those that did not).  President Obama said a very true thing today – attending his last wreath-laying ceremony as President – that we should remember that each and every one of the soldiers that lay down their lives defending our country, is a hero, is someone’s hero. They are sons and daughters, moms and dads, brothers, sisters, dear friends, platoon leaders, officers, sergeants, support personnel.  And we salute every one.

I was at the Northgate shopping complex on Saturday, and checked in at the Sports Authority sporting goods store that is closing there (for bargains, of course*).  The Colorado-based chain is going out of business.  I guess they were hurt by the soft-ish economy, the competition from other chains, and by Amazon that is eating everyone’s lunch to some extent.

*I didn’t buy anything.  I still have new-ish sneakers and enough t-shirts.  If the discounts go to 40% or 50%, I may buy some sneakers or a new tennis racket, even though I play very infrequently now.

There is a new series about the cosmos called ‘Genius’ presented by Stephen Hawking on the PBS broadcasting channel.  In Episode 3, the question ‘Why are we here?’ is posed, and answered in the best possible way that science can offer to date.   Hint : per our current understanding of quantum mechanics, it is likely that we do not actually live in a universe, but rather in a multiverse : the hypothetical set of finite and infinite possible universes, including the universe in which we live.

[Spoiler alert!  Stop reading here if you want to watch the full episode to see how the answer unfolds].

Here are Stephen Hawking’s concluding remarks from the episode, and the answer to the question.  ‘ .. although each of us is a product of the universe, the universe we live in, is personal to us’.  The universe splits into all possible universes, all the time.  We may be tiny and feeble compared to the majesty of the cosmos, but in a very real way it exists just for you.  The universe you see is the one that gave rise to you, out of all the possible universes, and that is why you are here.  So no matter how bad things get, I always say, don’t look down at your feet, but look up at the stars.