The leading candidates on both sides got a beating in the Wisconsin presidential primary elections tonight : Trump beaten by Cruz and Hillary Clinton by Bernie Sanders. Check out the maps from the New York Times. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the margin of victory was. Trump acted like a sulking loser, and accused Cruz of being a Trojan horse (of the Republican establishment trying to stop him from winning the nomination). Oh, and Trump also says Cruz indulged in illegal politicking, without offering any evidence.
Here’s the Trojan horse from the 2004 movie Troy.And here is Trump’s campaign statement after the Wisconsin results.
Kris Jenkins’ buzzer-beating 3-pointer won Villanova its second-ever national championship. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images
There was an epic finish to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s annual basketball tournament tonight : Villanova defeated North Carolina 77-74 thanks to a game winning 3-pointer from Kris Jenkins in the 2016 National Championship game. The final points were made in the final second of the game. Check out the sequence of frames below, that shows the clock running down in tens of seconds, then the buzzer starts with the ball in the air, and it makes it through just before the buzzer stops. I guess the championship games are not called March Madness for nothing.
1.0 sec0.6 sec0.3 sec0.0 sec .. game time is over. the buzzer starts, with the red lights flashing –0.0 secs .. buzzer is on, the lights are still flashing –the buzzer stops and the game is over. The Villanova supporters erupt and storm onto the court, of course!
(This picture from the Getty Museum’s website). It is the main chamber of Cave 85 at the end of a conservation effort. These paintings are very, very old and date back to the late Tang dynasty ( 618–907 A.D.).
There is a roaming display of artwork from the caves of Dunhuang on display at the Seattle Art Museum. The exhibit contains Buddhist artwork and photographs of the caves of Dunhuang, an ancient and strategic location on the Silk Road. (The Silk Road is a network of trade routes that linked the Roman Empire with China for the trade of silk, spices and other commodities such as cotton and jade). A photojournalist called James C.M. Lo, and his wife Lucy, made several arduous journeys to the caves in 1943 during World War II, to systematically photograph the interiors and exteriors of the caves, and to draw attention to their historical significance.
The entrance to the Seattle Art Museum in Volunteer Park. There is a display of artwork and pictures, of the Dunhuang caves inside.The trade routes of the Silk Road. Dunhuang is just above the white patch of Himalayan snow on the map.
One of the SAP S4 training courses I am doing is called ‘How to build an SAP Fiori Application in the Cloud’. So let me explain this course title.
‘SAP Fiori’ is the new ‘Windows 10’ style tile interface that SAP is making available for its entire suite of mission-critical business application software. (For example : a tile can show the number of purchase requisitions that a buyer needs to process. Or the number of emergency admissions into a hospital, in the last 24 hrs).
‘Application’ stands for the specific, targeted functions that will be built into each of the application tiles. For example : the classic SAP screens for processing purchase requisitions are monstrously complicated (multiple screens and tabs, with hundreds of fields!). These new apps will typically simplify those screens ten-fold.
‘In the Cloud’ means that the application code and the data that it presents and processes, will be hosted on a server that will make the applications and data available on any screen : desktops, as well as mobile devices such as iPads and iPhones.
There are lots of standard applications already available in the SAP library, but SAP has published powerful tools to enable their business users to conceive of, and design and build, any new applications that they may need.
Part of my assignment for this course was to conceive of a simple application, and then use the SAP ‘Splash’ application to prototype it. Check out the hand-drawn mock-ups that I imported into the Splash app for a museum curator. Once the mock-ups had been drawn into Splash, a large number of functions became available to add onto the layout, such as navigation functions, buttons, links and icons. In my example, the curator is using the app to find the Mona Lisa. So yes, I know : 1. that it means the curator works at the Louvre in Paris and 2. he will probably (hopefully) not need to use his app to find the Mona Lisa !
I sketched out layouts for four screens of my application that I call ‘The Curator’s Assistant’. The first screen is a listing of exhibits. the next one a listing of all the art in one exhibit that was selected, and then the next two screens show detail pages of the information for works of art.This is a listing of the exhibits. For example, click on ‘Renaissance Paintings’, which will bring up .... a listing of paintings in the Renaissance Paintings collection. Click on ‘The Mona Lisa’, and that will display .... the details of ‘The Mona Lisa’. (I imported a little .jpg picture of the Mona Lisa just to make it look a little more realistic). And then the back arrow will enable the user to go back.
I found this interesting article by the New York Times abouttrade deficits, and specifically the trade deficit that the USA has with the rest of the world. The bottom line : it’s complicated, and not clear at all that cutting the trade deficit is an option, or that cutting it will help American workers. (And the banana? The writer uses trade between the countries Bananaland and Carnation to illustratethe consequences of trading and trade deficits between two countries and the world at large).
The homepage of Intel paid tribute to Andy Grove with this picture.
Andy Grove, former CEO of the microprocessor manufacturing giant Intel, passed away on Monday March 21. Here is an interesting article from Bloomberg Businessweek titled Silicon Valley’s First Giant, written by Jim Aley.
You can put it in pocket! The Intel Compute Stick is built into a chassis that measures approximately 0.5 x 4 x 1.5 inches, and weighs a mere 1.9 ounces.
P.S. I browsed around on Intel’s website to check out the latest microchip processors, and found an very interesting new form factor for a computer : the computer on a stick. It is hard to believe what was crammed into this package. The stick has vents to keep it cool, and comes complete with a little power button, as well as a USB 2.0 and micro USB port. The USB 2.0 port is for a keyboard and mouse. A micro SD slot allows storage expansion to 128 GB. The stick comes loaded with Windows 10, and plugs into the HDMI port of a flat screen. And there you have it, a working Windows 10 computer. It sounds like science fiction, but it is not !
Here is a quick ‘post card’ I made from a New York Times subscription invitation with striking graphics and colors (‘Spring for the New York Times’, it said). I took the original lettering out and replaced it with a spring proverb that I like very much.
Pictures from the aftermath of the attacks in Brussels, from the on-line edition of the New York Times. From another article in the NYT: A handwritten note on the makeshift memorial next to him said, “In the end, when you see what can be done in the name of God, it makes you wonder what is left for the devil.”
I know very bad things happen every day around the world. Still, it’s a bad start to the day, to learn of another terrorist attack, this time in Brussels. Below is the New York Times link to the locations where the attacks happened.
It’s March 17, and so it is St Patrick’s Day. St. Patrick was a 5th century missionary who is Ireland’s main patron saint. The absence of snakes in Ireland gave rise to the legend that they had all been banished by St. Patrick chasing them into the sea after they attacked him during a 40-day fast he was undertaking on top of a hill [I read this in the Wikipedia entry for St Patrick].
There was a little bit of history made in New York City as well, with an LGBT group allowed for the first time by parade organizers to march behind their own banner.
I like the little leprechaun and four-leaf clover the weather report featured this morning. And yay! .. Seattle has a few days of sun into Saturday, with day temperatures around 60°F/ 15°C.
It’s Monday after a stormy weekend on the political scene as well. Donald Trump’s rally in Chicago on Friday night was cancelled after many protesters entered the arena where he was to speak, and as a result scuffles broke out. (No serious injuries, though). But Mr Trump did not denounce any of this .. in fact, he says he thinks it good for his campaign. And then in a new low of political opportunism (can it be anything else?), Ben Carson endorsed Trump this morning. Anyway : Super Tuesday No 3 is here tomorrow, with make-or-break primary elections for Messrs. Rubio and Kasich in their home states. If they don’t win there, they may very well have to pack it in and call it quits.
Trump and Clinton are the front-runners, and they are looking to extend their leads in tomorrow’s 2016 primary elections.The American primary system is extremely difficult to understand, and even more undemocratic.
I’m following the match-up between the world’s best player of the game of go, and a computer from DeepMind*, an artificial intelligence software house in London that was bought by Google in 2014. Go is played on a 19×19 grid of vertical and horizontal lines with black and white checkers. The number of games that can be played on it is enormous: The Economist’s article says a rough-and-ready guess gives around 10170. (Keep in mind there are only an estimated 1080 particles in the observable universe). Anyway : it’s 2-0 for the computer so far, but humans need not despair. General-purpose machine intelligence remains a long way off, says the article.
*Not to be confused with Deep Blue, the chess machine that beat Gary Kasparov in 1997.
Update :Sunday 3/13. I see it’s 3-1 for Deep Mind’s AlphaGo program. The South Korean Go master Lee Sidol won a game against the machine, at least denying it a clean sweep in the 5-game match-up.
There was a wide-spread Google server outage this Monday morning, which wreaked havoc on my ability to do any work. Our Google ‘cloud’ e-mail is accessed through the Chrome browser, as are several other mission critical applications : Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Hangouts. On top of that my local internet service provider Comcast, experienced a brief outage as well.
Finally, as I turned the TV on during lunch to check on the stock market close, it was apparently time for the monthly test of the King County emergency broadcasting system. Well ! I thought. At least I will know if that 9.0 earthquake- tsunami is coming for me during the next 15 minutes!
(All this information from TIME magazine’s March 07 cover story). ‘You can’t have a person driving a 2-ton death machine’ said Elon Musk at a conference last year. The numbers are sobering : about 33,000 Americans die in auto accidents in a year, with an additional 2 million or so injured. Some 94% of accidents are the fault of drivers. The price tag for this mayhem comes to some $836 billion by one estimate. Even if only 10% of vehicles can be converted to self-driving cars or trucks, the number of accidents could be reduced by 211,000 and 1,100 lives be saved every year. But it will not be easy. Whole industries (such as the auto insurance industry) will be upended, and as TIME puts it : even though there is no ‘right to drive’ enshrined in the US Constitution .. ‘in the throne room of the American psyche, a driver’s seat occupies center stage’.
Man. What an embarrassment the Republican ‘Presidential’ debate on Thursday night in Detroit, Michigan, was. (Quotes added since hardly any presidential demeanor was on display. It was a schoolyard brawl.) Donald Trump called Marco Rubio ‘Little Marco’ and Ted Cruz ‘Lying Ted’. Forget ‘Mister’ or ‘Senator’. Forget waiting your turn to speak. Just interrupt as soon as the other guy starts talking. And is this exchange for real? (yes, it is, verbatim): Trump to Rubio joking about his anatomy. “He referred to my hands,” said Trump. “If they are small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee.” The nation averts its eyes and covers its ears.
From npr.org : The 11th GOP debate, at the historic Fox Theatre in Detroit, may have been the most bruising yet for Donald Trump, as rivals Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz largely ignored each other to concentrate on the front-runner. Photo by Paul Sancya/AP
The results for the ‘Super Tuesday’ elections are in. (Super Tuesday is called that since 11 states have their 2016 Presidential primary elections on this same day). I love the maps of the USA that show the states that voted. Here are the Republican Party’s results and the Democratic Party’s results on two maps (from the on-line edition of the New York Times). It’s looking more and more like it’s going to be Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton in the November general election.
It’s the 29th of Feb! .. a day that comes by only once in four years, but then again, it’s a completely arbitrary thing and a human invention, the leap year with its leap day. Check out Amanda Foreman’s write-up in the weekend’s Wall Street Journal about the calendars and how Pope Gregory XIII’s calendar became the one that we have measured the days of the year by since 1582.
It’s spring here in California, that’s for sure! Our project is in its final three weeks, and the remaining project team members have given up their office space in Walnut Creek and moved to San Ramon. It is an upgrade of sorts : the old building in Walnut Creek was built in the 1970s with outdated cubicles and all. This building is more or less state-of-the-art; not Google or Facebook league, but still new with a ‘town square’ cafeteria space, ‘huddle rooms’ for quick meetings, and meeting rooms with built-in projectors and electrical outlets right there on the desktop (and not on the floor in a corner somehere).
Trees with white blossoms in the parking lot of the office building where I worked this week.
The leading candidates on both sides got a beating in the Wisconsin presidential primary elections tonight : Trump beaten by Cruz and Hillary Clinton by Bernie Sanders. Check out the maps from the New York Times. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the margin of victory was. Trump acted like a sulking loser, and accused Cruz of being a Trojan horse (of the Republican establishment trying to stop him from winning the nomination). Oh, and Trump also says Cruz indulged in illegal politicking, without offering any evidence.
