Category: General

Here’s Homer in a Simpsons episode called ‘Mathlete’s Feat’ that aired in May 2015.  It’s actually a pretty sophisticated mathematical joke we have going here.  I suspect some people may recognize the π at the end (Greek letter pi, and for Homer it would be ‘pie’) .. but the other symbols are more hard-core math.  So let me decode it.  The square root of negative 1 is a mathematically imaginary number usually written as ‘i’.  Two to the power of three is 2 x 2 x 2 which is eight.  The Greek letter sigma is used to indicate ‘sum’ or ‘sum of’.  And so : Homer says ‘I ate some pie and it was delicious’.

Alright .. so by Friday afternoon the big snowstorm had started to make its mark across the mid-Atlantic, and into New York City.  There are lots of creative pictures of the snow on Twitter.   And this video clip of Tian Tian, a giant panda enjoying the snow at the National Zoo in Washington DC, is great, too!

Just a silly animated .gif picture I found on line.  The cat’s expression as the dog starts to stir is priceless. (Maybe there is food?).  And then the cat knows : this siesta is so over. Scram !

There is a big winter snow storm on the way to the mid-Atlantic region (Washington DC and surroundings) that will start on Friday and bring as much as two feet of snow to an area that usually measures its snow in inches, not feet.   Already on Wednesday night, an unexpected inch of snow turned the freeways around the city into a skating rink, and some commuters reported spending 6 or 7 hours in their cars before reaching their homes.    The problem with snowfall that had not been forecast, is that salting of the road surfaces was not done – and then the roads and freeways also become completely clogged up with slow moving traffic. So there is no way to react and remedy the situation after that, either.

Just when one thinks (have we not learned better by now?) one has seen it all with the Donald-Trump-for-President candidacy, he reaches into his top hat and pulls out another rabbit.  So there she was on Monday, Sarah Palin, John McCain’s 2008 Vice Presidential running mate, endorsing Mr Trump in a ‘meandering, fiery, sarcastic, patriotic and blustery speech that does not easily submit to categorization’, says The New York Times.   The tabloid Daily News was way more blunt : ‘I’m with Stupid!’ said their Tuesday edition front page, in the biggest letter font that they could fit onto it.

*Squirmish : a word used in the Palin speech (not sure if by accident or intentional).  Per the New York Times  ‘.. and, more notably, coins a new word, squirmishes, a cross between squirm (which means to wriggle the body from side to side) and skirmish (which means a brief fight or encounter between small groups). Twitter embraced the new term instantly’.

 

The B.P. oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, is the worst environmental disaster in U.S history. In July 2015, B.P. agreed to pay about $18.7 billion in damages for water pollution caused by the spill, after being found ‘grossly negligent’ for its role in the oil spill.   Well – since October of last year now, there is a natural gas leak in Porter Ranch, California that threatens to rival the B.P. oil spill with its environmental impact.  By all accounts, the company (Southern California Gas), followed all the rules and regulations to maintain control of the massive gas storage facility in Aliso Canyon, its volume about one cubic mile, and a mile and a half below ground.  The problem is that the rules are too soft, and undemanding, and does not take into account the ageing infrastructure of many of these storage facilities.  All attempts so far to ‘kill the well’ has failed.  The company has spent $50 million on the repairs and the relocation of 2,500 families.  The current plan is to drill a relief well alongside the existing leaking well – a project that is estimated to fix the leak sometime in March.   The LA Weekly reports : The Aliso Canyon leak has increased the state’s methane emissions by 21 percent. As of now, 2.3 percent of the state’s entire carbon footprint is coming from one hole in the ground above Porter Ranch.

 

I visited one of my favorite stores in Seattle, the University of Washington bookstore, on Saturday.  Outside the bookstore, two Bernie Sanders campaigners (students) had a table set up and they were handing out Bernie Sanders flyers (Yes, I’ll take one, I said), .. ‘and would I come to the Movement for Bernie march next Saturday?’  Well, ‘I will try’, I said. The first votes in the State primaries start with Iowa’s caucuses on Feb 1st.  After March 1st, the so-called Super Tuesday, a clearer picture should emerge as to who the Republican nominee for President may be, and who the Democratic nominee may be.

Well, well, well.  So by the end of the second week in 2016, the oil price had crashed to below $30 a barrel, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average is 12.7% off its high of May 2015.   The 200-day moving average on the S&P 500 is now trending down, an ominous sign that things are moving in the wrong direction (and have been for a while).  And man!  are the opinions all over the map!  Some say the Fed should reverse its rate hike of December.  But no, says the Federal Reserve Bank Governor from New York : the four rate hikes foreseen in December for 2016 are absolutely all still on the table.  Micheal Pento argues on CNBC’s web site that A recession worse than 2008 is coming.   Worse than 2008? because the Fed is out of ammunition to fight another big recession (‘former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke took the overnight interbank lending rate down to zero percent from 5.25 percent and printed $3.7 trillion’).  We will just have to wait and see.

 

I see there is a new strain of dog flu doing the rounds in the Western USA.  Here in Washington State, the health department is warning pet owners after possible exposure at a Seattle-area kennel.  (The reports don’t mention any risk to humans, so I assume there is none).

Check out the New York Times’s spectacular ’52 Places to Go in 2016′ article, here. Some of the photos are animated (they are really short video clips).  I see Mozambique made the list as well, with kudos to its government for promoting peace and tolerance.

P.S.  At least three tickets match the winning numbers of the gargantuan jackpot, it was reported this morning.  Good, said a financial adviser on TV this morning.  With that out of the way, people can get on with their lives and take control over their own financial futures!

We have quite an outrageous lottery drawing prize in the making here in the United States Powerball lottery for Wednesday night : $1.5 billion. Whoah. (The result of 19 drawings with no winning numbers).   As the website twocents put it : You have a better chance of getting hit by lightning in a frog thunderstorm than you do winning the Powerball, but hey, it’s always fun to play billionaire.  

Winning would invite all kinds of problems, of course.  (Mostly good ones!  .. such as how to invest tens of millions of dollars at a pop.  What kind of new house to buy, and where? Or how to help family members without losing half the money you give them to taxes .. for example, there is an annual limit of $14,000 on gifts before a form of gift taxes kick in).

Check out my manga book (bought it in Japan), part of a series with protagonist ‘Division Chief Kosaku Shima’ .  I liked the style of the pictures, I liked that it was in English, and I thought it was unusual to find manga* that depicted dealings in business/ commerce.

*[From Wikipedia]  Manga is a Japanese word referring both to comics and cartooning. ‘Manga’ as a term used outside Japan refers specifically to comics originally published in Japan. … In Japan, people of all ages read manga.  The medium includes works in a broad range of genres: action-adventure, business/commerce, comedy, detective, historical drama, horror, mystery, romance, science fiction and fantasy, sexuality, sports and games, and suspense, among others.

I had to adjust to my jet lag from Down Under and the Far East this week, and it is going a lot better.   The financial markets also seemed to have calmed somewhat after the Chinese stock market held up (and the circuit breakers are no longer used).  A decent December USA job report came out : employment rose by 292,000; the unemployment rate is unchanged at 5.0%.  But check out the concerns in the January 2016 investment outlook authored by Bill Gross, now working for Janus Capital Group. He went by the moniker ‘the bond king’ (maybe he still does?), back when he ran PIMCO’s $270.0 billion Total Return Fund (PTTRX).

Here’s an extract from Bill’s January 2016 news letter :

The Romans gave their Plebian citizens a day at the Coliseum, and the French royalty gave the Bourgeoisie a piece of figurative “cake,” so it may be true to form that in the still prosperous developed economies of 2016, we provide Fantasy Sports, cellphone game apps, sexting, and fast food to appease the masses. Keep them occupied and distracted at all costs before they recognize that half of the U.S. population doesn’t go to work in the morning and that their real wages after conservatively calculated inflation have barely budged since the mid 1980’s. Confuse them with demagogic and religious oriented political candidates to believe that tomorrow will be a better day and hope that Ferguson, Missouri and its lookalikes will fade to the second page or whatever it’s called these days in new-age media.

Meanwhile, manipulate (sic) prices of interest rates and stocks to benefit corporations and the wealthy while they feast on exorbitantly priced gluten-free pasta and range-free chicken at Whole Foods, or if even more fortunate, pursue high rise New York condos and private jets at Teterboro. It’s a wonderful life for the 1% and a Xanax existence for the 99. But who’s looking – or counting – even at the ballot box. November 2016 will not change a thing – 8 years of Hillary or 8 years of a non-Hillary. Same difference. Central bankers, Superpacs, and K street lobbyists are in control. Instead of cake, the 49.5% (males) will just have to chomp on their Carl’s Jr. hamburger and dream of a night with 23-year-old Kate Upton lookalikes that show them how to eat it during Super Bowl commercials. And if that’s too sexist, then Carl’s is substituting six-pack hunks instead of full-breasted models to appease the other 49.5% (females). It’s a Xanax society. We love it.

The New York Public Library has released nearly 200,000 public-domain items from its special collections. Check out the home page here.  Some of my favorite collections are those of the so-called cigarette cards : trade cards issued by tobacco manufacturers to stiffen cigarette packaging and advertise cigarette brands.  

The series ‘This Age of Power & Wonder’ must have been issued in South Africa, since the cards have both English and Afrikaans on the back of the card !  I just do not recall ever seeing cigarette cards in South Africa when I was growing up.

 

News came in on Wednesday night of a second circuit-breaker induced trading halt on the Chinese stock exchange on Thursday, with the index down 7% for a second time this week.   Some people say the circuit-breakers are counter-productive, and that the stock market should be left to its own devices, to find a bottom.   And what will happen on Friday? Will the circuit-breakers halt trading for a third time?  We will all have to wait and see.  And not panic. As Steve Mollman and Jennifer Timmons note in this article : in China’s volatile market a 5% drop or jump isn’t uncommon in a normal trading day.  In the USA we say the market is ‘sharply down’ when it is down 2%.

I promise this is the last picture of my Australia/ Japan souvenirs.  I had Doraemon from a previous trip : the enduring robotic cat manga comic character originally published in 1969 in Japan.   The koala does not have a name (maybe Bernie?*), and I found it in a souvenir store in Mandurah.

*In honor of Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders

I learned on Sunday night that I would not have to travel to California early Monday morning. (Yay!).  I get to work from home.  And on Monday night I thought the 2016 Australian Open tennis tournament had started, but I see it starts only on Jan 18.  So I will have to be patient to see if either of the former World No 1’s Roger Federer or Australian Lleyton Hewitt, both aged 34, can notch up one Grand Slam win for the history books.   I for one, root for Federer.  Check out the tribute written for the New York Times in 2006 by David Foster Wallace. It gives me goosebumps to read it.

Part of the joy of coming home from a long trip to new places for me it to unpack and ‘discover’ the little souvenirs that I had collected everywhere I had been.  So may I present out of my suitcase – and from the Akihabara store in Tokyo – some ‘spark dolls’ from the Ultra Monster series. These are monsters that battle with superhero Ultraman.  From Wikipedia : Ultraman (ウルトラマン) is a Japanese live-action television series that first aired in 1966. Ultraman ultimately became a major pop culture phenomenon in Japan. The show’s success spawned dozens of sequels, spin-offs, imitators, parodies and remakes.

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge across the Pearl River Delta has been 30 years in the making.  ‘When completed, the 42km-long Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge will be one of the longest bridges above water in the world, constructed with the mission to speed up integration of cities in the Pearl River Delta. Will it be worth its staggering cost?‘ asks the South China Morning Post in a November 19 report.  Here is a link.

Alright!  It is almost time to kick 2015 – the-year-that-was – out the back door here in the far eastern time zones of the globe.  Sydney is three hours ahead of Perth still, so it will be 2016 in that part of Australia by the time I board my flight tonight to start heading back to the USA.  I am actually making a stop in Hong Kong again, and then I will overnight in Tokyo on New Year’s Day evening before heading home.