Category: General

It’s Memorial Day weekend here in the United States.  (Yay!  Monday is a holiday, and the unofficial start of summer).  The New York Times pointed out to New Yorkers that two days of ‘Manhattanhenge‘ are coming up : when the setting sun aligns perfectly with the numbered streets that run east and west on Manhattan’s city grid, bathing traffic and skyscrapers in its warm red light.   This year’s displays will occur at about 8:12 p.m. this Sunday and Monday, and again on July 11 and 12.

‘Alright, people’, said the partner in charge of our presentation prep, ‘no more changes‘ (to the presentation materials). ‘We’re at the top of the water slide, and we have started down.  Let’s make a big splash’. 

This was at 9 this morning, as we went through the set of PowerPoint slides one more time.  The presentation’s duration was a total of 2 hours, and our presentation team was six strong.  So I actually had only five slides to talk about !  The slide comes up, you make your points, your pitch, explain what the proposed solution is, and then you might get peppered with questions from the audience.  We had rehearsed our talking points and answers five or six times (!) the last three days, and it helped a lot this afternoon at the presentation, to make us come across as prepared, confident and familiar with the materials.

So at 12 noon sharp, and sharply dressed, we drove out to San Ramon on the east side of the Bay.  We ended up sitting in between 20 or so people in a U-shaped layout. (Sometimes the presentation team all sit at the front).   I’m happy to report that it went well, I did not single-handedly torpedo our efforts with any faux pas – and we hope to find out in the next few days that we had won the work!

How well do you know the Nordic countries’ flags?  Check them out on the cool dessert from Friday night’s state dinner hosted by the Obamas in Washington DC!

P. S. Friday marked the end of a dizzying week in which there had been revelations on a daily basis in the national media about Republican presidential candidate Trump.  Here is a sample.  1. His tax returns are ‘none of your business’ he snapped back at George Stephanopoulos (former White House communications director, now ABC news anchor). Presidential candidates have released their tax returns since Richard Nixon had done that in.  2012 Presidential candidate Mitt Romney calls this ‘disqualifying’ for a candidate running for president.   2. The Washington Post revealed that/ reminded voters that in 1991 Trump would call up reporters, posing as his own ‘PR man’ as ‘John Miller’ or ‘John Barron’, discussing his divorce proceedings, and how he should be portrayed in the media, and that he is ‘starting to do really well financially’.  Here’s the thing.  Pressed about it on Friday morning on the Today show, Trump now he denies outright that it was him.  ‘No, that doesn’t sound like me. Wasn’t me’.   3.  His crude objectifying of women on Howard Stern’s radio shows from those days got more air again, this week. 4.  Mr Trump seemed to back away from his controversial statements on the campaign trail such as the ban on Muslims entering the USA, saying all his positions are merely ‘suggestions’ and that everything is ‘negotiable’.   5.  Still no endorsement from Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, after the much hyped-up meeting on Thursday.

I’ve known about West Virginia since I was very young, thanks to John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ .. but I’ve never been there, actually.  So with yesterday’s Presidential primary elections there, I had to take a look at the map.  West Virginia is coal country, and candidate Clinton got in hot water for being too candid about the prospects of the coal mines, and jobs in the coal industry. (It is probably one of the reasons that Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton there).

Those coal mining jobs have been disappearing for many years – for decades – and they will not come back.  The US government has put a freeze on issuing new leases for coal mining on public lands this January.   There are cheaper and cleaner alternatives such as natural gas, available.  And finally, the coal industry itself has been mechanizing the mining of coal, so an entire mountain top can be mined with a handful of operators.

But never mind all this :  a few days ago Donald Trump had a big ostentatious rally with coal miner hard hat and all, pantomiming a coal miner shoveling coal, and declaring : we will get those jobs back.  And this tweet : Obama’s war on coal is killing American jobs, making us more energy dependent on our enemies & creating a great business disadvantage.  Well.  If only the world were that simple.

Technically speaking, there was a solar eclipse of sorts going on today .. but since Mercury is just a dot when seen against the sun, it is called a traversal of Mercury across the sun.   Since I did not have a special telescope with a dark lens, it was good enough for me to check the accelerated video clip from NASA.   For me, the sun is the amazing thing in the clip.  Such a giant ball of hydrogen fusion – has been at it for 4.5 billion years, and will be around for another estimated 6 billion years.  Will Earth still have humans on, then? And hopefully the humans would have found another Earth to inhabit by then, because the sun will become a red giant, cast off its lighter elements in a planetary nebula, and end up as a white dwarf.

A happy Mother’s Day to all the moms!

Here is a picture from the Flickr photo stream of Masashi Wakui .. I wish I could take pictures like these !  Sharp detail, amazing colors, rain-in-the-city-at-night atmosphere.

So it’s official (per Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus) : the Republican Party will nominate Donald Trump as their party’s candidate for the 2016 US Presidential Election. Trump won the Indiana Republican Primary Election easily today, forcing main rival Ted Cruz to drop out of the race.   The result : we have an egotistical-billionaire-reality-TV host, with no political experience whatsoever, who is really not even a Republican, as the Republican Party’s nominee!  That’s why the New York Daily News cover of Wednesday announces that the Republican Party as we have known it thus far, is dead.   Also check out this analysis that Ezra Klein from explain-the-news web site vox.com offers.

I don’t follow any of the soccer leagues closely, but there were several articles in the news lately, describing the against-all-odds run of the Leicester* City soccer team in the Premier League this past season.  (They have just won it, with the outcome of a match between Tottenham and Chelsea making Leicester City end at the top of the league, and by a wide margin).

Sports commentators describe it as the greatest season in sports history. The full story in the New York Times reports that the Leicester team’s payroll is roughly a quarter of Chelsea’s when it won the 2014-15 title, and that they finished 14th last season, and that their escape from relegation is a story (and a soccer miracle) all its own.

*Say LESS-ter

It is time to pack my bags to start traveling north.  I will travel back to Paris and Frankfurt tonight, and will stay in Europe a few days before flying west to Seattle.  I try to keep my souvenir purchases to a minimum these days (my study and my house are full of items already!) – but I could not resist this t-shirt, and the little colorful beaded giraffe.

Protea is both the botanical name and common name for a large group of flowers found in the Cape Town area and on the slopes of Table Mountain.  They are named after the Greek god Proteus (who could change his form at will), because they have such a wide variety of forms.

There is no shortage of coffee shops in South Africa .. but even so, Starbucks is about to open its first store in Johannesburg (in a suburb called Rosebank).  In the mean time, there is the ‘Seattle Coffee Company’ that provides excellent coffees.  Curiously though, no filtered coffee was on the menu, so I had to order an Americano (a shot of espresso with hot water added).

Check out this amazing picture from the front page of Thursday’s newspaper here – of a 20 ton Bryde’s whale and a school of mackerel.  The beast came from below and breached the surface right next to a snorkeling diver that was checking out a school of mackerel near the coast in the Port Elizabeth area.  (Bryde’s whale eat fish and not plankton).  It disappeared immediately after that, leaving the snorkeler and photographer wondering : whoah! whathappened? did that really happen?

I mentioned in a post last year that there had been plans on the drawing board for South Africa to build a large number of new nuclear power stations (8 to 12).  Well, it turns out a lot of events had transpired behind the scenes.  So much has happened, that veteran journalist Allister Sparks writes in this article (in Afrikaans, unfortunately) that what we know now is likely still ‘the ears of the hippopotamus’ only.  A whole hippopotamus is still out there.  It all seems to be connected : the proposal of adding 9 600 MW of extra electrical capacity to the electrical power grid, by building the nuclear power stations, the approval of the proposal made possible by the unconditional support of Zuma’s allies in government, and Zuma’s sacking of two consecutive South Africa’s Finance Ministers (Pravin Gordhan en Nhlanhla Nene) over their objections to find funding for the proposal. Rough estimates came in at one trillion* South African Rand/ approx.US$ 66 billion.   *One followed by twelve zeros.

And then there is the Gupta family and Zuma’s son Duduzane that have purchased an outsize number of shares in the Shiva Uranium mine, and discussions that Zuma personally had with then-Russian Prime Minister Russian Dmitry Medvedev in 2010, and current Russian President Vladimir Putin Rosatom for awarding the deal to the Rosatom State Atomic Energy Corporation.  Where will this all end?  Zuma still has a lot of support from his African National Congress Party, but the ANC leadership from Gauteng Province has broken ranks and is now calling for Zuma’s resignation.

The New York Times noted in an article ‘When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime’ that humans won’t be obsolete for a long time, if ever.

The concept of a ‘singularity’ was posited in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, a computer scientist and science fiction writer, who said that accelerating technological change would inevitably lead to machine intelligence that would match and then surpass human intelligence.

Well, there has been a long history of over-promising on what technology can do, and what is really delivered. (My internet access at home was completely flaky and unreliable on Wednesday, for example).   There are significant barriers ahead as far as creating ever-more powerful computer chips (the circuits are now down to a few atoms wide), and we still don’t understand well enough how the human brain works, so that computer learning programs can be modeled on the brain.  And hey, check out this 1958 write-up in the NYT about a thinking machine called the Perceptron, developed by the US Navy.

I finally took the plunge and acquired a new camera.  It was overdue, seeing that the one I have dates back to 2009.  Digital cameras are computers that take pictures, and my new EOS 7D Mark II has two new processors in, two card slots, a new sensor*, and a massive array of 65 autofocus elements in the focusing screen.  It can take up to 10 frames per second, and can set the shutter to 1/8,000 of a second. (That may be enough to freeze a hummingbird’s wings in flight).   I could have bought the camera on-line, but since the Best Buy electronics store let me put my grubby hands on 12 different cameras they had on display, and gave me good advice, I felt it’s only right that they get my money.

*It’s not a full-frame sensor, something I took a long time to make my peace with.  But at $1,500 the camera body is an absolute bargain, compared to the $3,200 mirrorless camera from Sony that is generating quite a buzz, and that I had also considered. (The Sony camera takes 42 MP photos and super-high definition (4K) video with its brand new full frame sensor). But by sticking with Canon, I don’t have to buy new lenses (good lenses start at $600 and go up from there) and battery packs, and I don’t have to learn all the little settings for the new camera.