Category: General

Hmm. A good thing I read this on Monday night we had returned from our little swim at Rottnest Island. (Rotto is shorthand for Rottnest Island).  There are about 12 shark attacks recorded on average per year on Australian beaches.   This year has seen 33 attacks with 2 fatalities.

We checked out the Perth Mint on Sunday.  (I love shiny coins). The Perth Mint was established in 1899, the last of three Australian colonial branches of the United Kingdom’s Royal Mint – after the now-defunct Sydney Mint and Melbourne Mint. (Yes, there was a gold rush to Western Australia as well; several, actually, with the discovery of alluvial gold at Kalgoorlie in 1893 the most significant).

The tour of the Mint features a display of the largest gold coin in the world : 80 cm (31 in) in diameter and 12 cm (4.7 in) thick, and made of 1,012 kg (2,231 lb) of 99.99% pure gold.  The coin’s face value is A$ 1 million, but the bullion in it is actually worth some A$53.5 million.   (No pictures were allowed inside the Mint, but here is a link to a picture of it).

Merry Christmas!  Yes, there are a few Santas, snowmen and sleighs on the lawns here in Perth as well (the picture is from our drive around the neighborhood last night). 

Here’s a little report from a Wall Street Journal newspaper from last week, about the residents in Johannesburg putting out food for the hadida ibis.   I would see them on lawns in the neighborhood every morning as I bicycled to school.   The drought in the Johannesburg area has made it hard for them to find their favorite food, though : earthworms.

P.S.  The sound they make is Ha-Ha Ha Dee Da! (not ‘Daw’).  Here’s a Youtube video of the bird.  I just could not find a nice clip with their distinctive ha dee da sound.

This November marked the 10th anniversary of Angela Merkel assuming the office of Chancellor of Germany.  TIME magazine named her 2015 Person of the Year for her handling of the Greek debt crisis and the Syrian refugee crisis, and the leadership she has shown. Check out this skit of her on the TV show Saturday Night Live.

There is outrage in South Africa over President Jacob Zuma’s firing of finance minister Nhlanhla Nene – with no explanation offered – this week.  Nene was well-respected and one of a few in the government untainted by corruption scandals.   The nature of the disagreements between him and Zuma are not known, but speculation has it that it may have been over yet another bail-out needed for the beleaguered South African Airways, or even over the projected capital expenditures for building several nuclear reactors for the national electrical utility company Eskom.

Anyway : all of this had the South African Rand fall to a record low of R16.05 per dollar before improving to R15.76 by 7:04 p.m. in Johannesburg on Friday.  I remember a time in 1990 upon my first visit to the USA, when the exchange rate was R2.50 to the dollar. My dad used to explain to us at the dinner table that a higher exchange rate would normally favor local (South African) manufacturers and exporters .. but at some point, imported items would become prohibitively expensive.   The current exchange rate cannot possibly be good for the country.

Friday’s good US jobs report for November, makes a Federal Funds Rate increase in mid-December ‘all but a done deal’, say most economists. (The rate has been at zero for more than 6 years).  US interest rates are going in the opposite direction of those in Europe, though.  Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, dissatisfied with the performance of the eurozone economy, recently cut Central Bank interest rates from an already negative 0.2% to -0.3%.  What does that even mean?   Well, Europeans now pay the bank interest to hold their euros.  So .. better to keep it in the freezer?  Under the mattress?  It can still get stolen from there, so I guess if I were them, I’d still go with putting my cash in the bank. Grrr.

Here are some financial graphs from the New York Times.

With news of a mass shooting* here in San Bernardino California (about 60 miles east of Los Angeles), I guess I’d better pay attention to the Quick Reference Guide for Active Shooter Events that had been posted in several places in our project office’s building. What a sad state of affairs.  Even sadder : politicians doing nothing about laws that still allow mentally ill people to buy guns at auctions, that still allow the sale of assault weapons, and no mandate that gun manufacturers to put vanilla iPhone fingerprint technology on gun triggers. So the killing continues.

*14 people dead in today’s shooting.  Does it seem like we have one every other day here in the USA?  Well, we kind of actually do.

Check out the tips for gift giving from my hotel newspaper (the Wall Street Journal).  It says men are tougher to buy gifts for than women are !

Here’s my crossing of the Bay Bridge at 1.15 am on Monday morning with very light traffic. Man!  I see there had been lots of issues during the construction of the bridge (with a $6.4 billion price tag, by the way), some of them still unresolved.

Bay Bridge problems (as reported by sfgate.com, here)

Recent issues with the Bay Bridge eastern span:

Cable: Bridge maintenance experts urged Caltrans to retrofit the span’s main cable to protect it from corrosion, and the project’s chief designer warned that leaks raised the threat of corrosion in the cable’s two anchorages.

Tower rods: Water has flooded most of the 400-plus rod sleeves in the tower foundation. One rod has failed, and others developed tiny cracks. Caltrans says the rods aren’t in danger.

Deck concerns: Several of the 14 giant steel boxes that form the two bridge decks did not fit together neatly during construction. The bridge’s chief designer acknowledged that some joints are likely to suffer “local damage” in a big earthquake.

Leaks: Water has been leaking into the hollow bridge structure since at least 2012. Caltrans says there has been no damage, but outside experts say there are indications of rust and corrosion.

The COP21 ’21st Conference of the Parties’ starts on Monday in Le Bourget, France (it’s in the greater Paris area).  The conference is the annual meeting of all countries which want to take action for the climate.

Black Friday comes after Thanksgiving.  The ‘door buster’ video footage of customers charging into mall stores seems to be a thing of the past (thankfully) .. but even so, overall 2015 holiday sales here in the USA are forecast to reach an all-time high of $630 billion.  Of that, $93 billion will be spent online, up almost 10 percent from 2014.  I was checking out the merchandise on offer on-line .. with a new digital camera is still in my shopping cross-hairs. ‘Cyber’ Monday is coming, of course – a term used to promote on-line sales just, what, 5 years, 10 years ago – that already seems outdated and almost quaint.

Here’s a cute story that ran in Monday’s edition of the Wall Street Journal, of a slice of country in Germany that was an accident of careless map drawing after World War I. I love maps, and to boot, I was born in the Free State province of South Africa. (It used to be called the Orange Free State, after the Orange River. After 1994, it was simply renamed to the Free State province).

Here is the link to the WSJ story.

It was March 2012 when I was approaching the end of working in China, and one year after the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster (in Japan, after the earthquake and tsunami), that the influential news magazine The Economist declared nuclear power ‘the dream that failed’.  The writers did admit that nuclear power will stick around for a long time (conventional reactors as opposed to fusion reactors, that is).

South Africa for one, is looking to add eight new eight new reactors at an estimated cost of some $50 billion to the sole nuclear power plant* on African soil.  This would pump an extra 9,600 megawatts (MW) of power into the national grid.  China, France, Russia, South Korea and the United States are bidding to construct the plants, with the winner expected to be announced early next year.  It will be fascinating to see who wins the award.  China and Korea are contending that they can construct standard international nuclear power plant designs (such the AP1000 from Westinghouse-Toshiba) for 50% of the typical capital cost.

*The Koeberg reactor north of Cape Town that contributes 2,000 MW or 4% of the country’s electrical power generation.

One week on from the terrorist attacks in Paris, it is clear that the psychological blast zone extends well across the Atlantic and into the political discourse here in the USA.

‘Register all Muslims in a database’ says Donald Trump.  ‘We have no way to properly vet these (Syrian) refugees’ says the other Republican candidate for President, Ben Carson. (Not true. Syrian refugees are mostly families with small children and have gone through several rounds of rigorous screenings and interviews by groups such as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organization for Migration, Homeland Security and the State Department before reaching the USA. The vetting process for Syrian refugees is very thorough and can take several years).

Unfortunately the public has always been prone to refugee and immigrant panic at times like these.  After Pearl Harbor, there was the forced relocation and incarceration of some 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the Pacific coast, in camps in the interior of the country [Wikipedia].  Horrible things were said of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.  And now Syrian refugees get the blame for what has happened in Paris because of one attacker’s Syrian passport.  (The rest were French and Belgian nationals. So should we stop French and Belgian people from coming to the USA?).

Monterey Bay was named after the 5th Count of Monterrey of Spain, in 1602.  The whole bay is a marine sanctuary, and has one of the largest underwater canyons in the world. Singer-songwriter John Denver died at the age of 53 when his experimental aircraft crashed in Monterey Bay in 1997.

We drive in to Salinas every day from Monterey, and I have just not been able to get away from work to go check out the historic Steinbeck House on Central Avenue. The house was the boyhood home to the author John Steinbeck(1902–1968), and he lived there on and off until 1935.  The house is noted for its Queen Anne architecture and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989.

Would I like to participate in my firm’s team fitness competition? inquired my colleague. The firm will throw in a free Fitbit*.  I was still um-ing and ah-ing when they signed me up anyway, and now I have a Fitbit around my wrist.   I will give it a try for a week or two (but what do I do with my favorite Seiko wristwatch? maybe I will try to wear both).

Check out the sample sleep pattern below, collected by a Fitbit.  It’s clear that time in bed is NOT EQUAL to time asleep!  Fitbit does not count ‘restless’ or ‘awake’ time.  There is a little accelerometer in the band that measures activity. So all the sleeper has to do is wear the band, and tap it for a second or two to when he/ she goes to sleep.

*A very popular fitness tracker-gadget worn around the wrist that tracks one’s physical activity, and even one’s sleep patterns.

There was blanket coverage of the events in Paris, and ISIS, all weekend on the cable news networks here in the USA.  Yes, ISIS* is waging war in Iraq and Syria, but is involved in many, many more countries and places in the world.    ISIS is at the same time an idea-state, a state of mind, a territory, and a terrorist organization.

*ISIS stands for Islamic State in Iraq and Syria because the group’s territory straddles the border between the two counties. The acronym ISIL is sometimes used, and stands for Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. The Levant is the historic name given to the entire region east of the Mediterranean from Egypt, east to Iran and to Turkey.

World landmarks have been lit up in blue, white and red to show solidarity with Paris and with the French people, in the aftermath of Friday night’s terrorist attcks.